Important Note About Embedding Images
The last few days I've received some troubling news about people not being able to view certain threads, check their inboxes, and in some cases couldn't even get to their "My Home" page.
After about 7.5 hours of troubleshooting it this morning (which included running multiple maintenance plans on the web and database servers), I found the culprit to be embedded images.
When I say "embedded images," I'm not referring to images that you upload or link to, but instead images that get translated into images from base64 data. Sometimes this occurs when dragging-and-dropping images from certain smart devices or software. If you don't know what this means, it's not really that important as now you'll see an image in place of your embedded image:
If you see this, please don't do what you did to see this.
The problem with this type of image embedding is that the image data is contained as plain text (base64-encoded) in the body of the post, private message, etc., and is stored in the database instead of as a binary. If you did this with 2-3 images on a simple forum post, your message could be upwards of 10 megabytes. When anyone tries to view the post, they're downloading a 10 MB file. When 100 logged-in users try to access that spiffy new post you made, the server is fetching 100x10 MB = 1 Gigabyte of data, which results in super slow responses due to most being queued.
How is this any different than someone posting 3 10 MB files? It's different because our application server has to throttle the data received from the database to the application server instead of letting the web server perform the throttling outside of the application server (so the application server can continue to serve up more requests, resulting in shorter queues = faster response times).
I've purged any images found to be embedded in private messages and forum posts. I hated to have to do this, but I really had no choice for the stability of the server. So if you see the image above, you know to perhaps re-upload using one of the several other methods provided in the editor:
Thanks
-Dain
After about 7.5 hours of troubleshooting it this morning (which included running multiple maintenance plans on the web and database servers), I found the culprit to be embedded images.
When I say "embedded images," I'm not referring to images that you upload or link to, but instead images that get translated into images from base64 data. Sometimes this occurs when dragging-and-dropping images from certain smart devices or software. If you don't know what this means, it's not really that important as now you'll see an image in place of your embedded image:
If you see this, please don't do what you did to see this.
The problem with this type of image embedding is that the image data is contained as plain text (base64-encoded) in the body of the post, private message, etc., and is stored in the database instead of as a binary. If you did this with 2-3 images on a simple forum post, your message could be upwards of 10 megabytes. When anyone tries to view the post, they're downloading a 10 MB file. When 100 logged-in users try to access that spiffy new post you made, the server is fetching 100x10 MB = 1 Gigabyte of data, which results in super slow responses due to most being queued.
How is this any different than someone posting 3 10 MB files? It's different because our application server has to throttle the data received from the database to the application server instead of letting the web server perform the throttling outside of the application server (so the application server can continue to serve up more requests, resulting in shorter queues = faster response times).
I've purged any images found to be embedded in private messages and forum posts. I hated to have to do this, but I really had no choice for the stability of the server. So if you see the image above, you know to perhaps re-upload using one of the several other methods provided in the editor:
Thanks
-Dain
Comments
And ImageShack free, awesome, and easy to use. Wish more people used it. I'm guessing that would save alot of server space.
I think auto uploading to default image album is going to rock!
Must be a big relief to have it nailed down.