Thursday, October 11, 2007

Mediamax blog 11 October 2007

The following has been posted on the official Mediamax blog (though no updates on the previous entries on the 401 error or maintenance). As you can't leave comments there, feel free to leave them here.

http://mediamaxblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/current-site-issues.html

---Mediamax blog quote

Current site issues

We are currently experiencing issues with our uploading system. This situation has caused user uploads to take several hours to process after the initial upload. We are working on resolving the situation. We will post here when the sitaution has been corrected.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience.

---ends

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Several hours, several HOURS?! *&$*&#$&, who the **** are they kidding? I've 'amused' myself the better part of today uploading the same files over and over and not a single one will turn up (and my initial upload was from 1,5 day ago). My fellow community members report the same ... MediaMax has turned into a giant black hole and whatever is uploaded never makes it to the file manager.

And to add insult to injury from what I read in previous messages here, recent uploads have turned unavailable at an alarming rate. I suppose this is related to the non-processing issue, but it's still worrysome ... especially in light of Martins findings that the recovery process leaves much to be desired .. or rather, many files to be awol still.

Damn, I'm really ticked off. Going to bed and hopefully when I wake up things finally will be a little better.

Anonymous said...

Don't count on it.

Martin said...

I too welcome the latest official MediaMax blog entry advising about delays with upload processing. It would have been more useful and circumented much end user angst and unneccessary repeated uploading if it had:
- been posted when the problem first occurred rather than 48 hours later after anyone trying to upload was frustrated and furious;
- included some sort of prediction about how long it would take to fix.

Mediamax, we might not like what you tell us when it is bad news, but we like it a whole lot less when you don't tell us or delay telling us that there is a problem.

Service Status Page

This has already been suggested by someone else in this blog. Surely it can't be that hard to implement a simple service status page that is automatically updated and reports the current upload processing delay? It doesn't have to be hugely accurate. If it says there is a 5 minute delay and my files appear in 60 seconds I won't be complaining.

Knowing that there is an upload processing backlog of 1 hour or 1 day or whatever, would prevent users unnecessarily uploading files multiple times when they fail to appear, which only increases the overload and then makes the upload backlog even worse.

Be proactive about this.

EegahInc said...

Oddly enough, right after this notice appeared on their blog, I received an email from support asking a lot of questions about how I upload, my connection speed, size of files, my user name(?), and a few other things. I haven't seen any results from my answers yet, but maybe there's hope.

I also discovered by hit and miss downloading that anything I uploaded in 2005 has gone bye-bye. The email from support said this would be fixed also at some point in the near future. We'll see.

Anonymous said...

my latest succesful upload was last friday for 1 album. So that's is 6 days ago. There is a fundamental problem going on there.

This kind of communication proves there are not taking their users serious. John Hoods reads this blog now and then so he knows about all the suggestions made. Why don't they show some effort in these suggestions made?

It is not hard to set up a status page, it is not hard to set up an ftp-server. Why are they not clear about what they are doing or not????

Anonymous said...

I'm seeing my uploads from the last 2 days appear little by little, but the processing system is most likely still struggling as uploads that are just finished haven't shown up yet.

I'm still rather upset that it took them basically 2 days before their blog stated the problems in the processing department. I'm betting that a lot of people like me have tried uploading files repeatedly in the hope that one of them would get through at last so now MMs processing service has to eat to a whole bunch of doubles / trebbles or even worse (I uploaded 2 files 5 times for instance).

If I might point out my addition to the wish-list. In a couple of the streamload versions (don't know if it was still present in V4) when you uploaded a file, but processing was slow, the file would still show up and could be used like any other file in your account (editing, moving, sending etc) EXCEPT for downloading. Files that were being processed would get auto tagged (processing) so they stood out and the tag would be auto removed once the file had been processed. If this could be implemented back we at least now if a file arrived and is awaiting processing instead of us now having to wait and hope it does finally show up or try and upload it again in the hope it shows up then.

This would save us and MM bandwith and MM processing servers wouldn't have to wade through all the double that are uploaded.

Mike Brady said...

I tried uploading a file 6 times over the past two days.

Three of them have now appeared.

Which is good. But does it mean that this 'feature' of having the change the checksum to re-upload a file has gone? The three files that have appeared (and all 6 uploads) are the identical.

Mike Brady said...

Would it better if Mediamax disabled uploading when it doesn't work?

Having people repeatedly trying to upload the same files must just clog the system up even more.

I'm thinking I might prefer it if when I came to the upload page it said something like: "It is currently taking greater than 1 hour to process uploads and so uploading has been temporarily disabled".

If this was coupled with a system so I could request an email when it was re-enabled that would remove some of the frustration.

The only downside I can see is that uploading would be almost permanently disabled given current performance!

Anonymous said...

Iirc, altering the checksum is only needed for files that were uploaded prior to june this year and which have become unavailable because of MMs cluster**** when they tried to shave of dead weight from their database when they were moving to their new datacenter.

Files uploaded after that can be (re-)uploaded (again) with the original exact same file.

Anonymous said...

Like you said Mike, it would be down nearly constantly with the current service. Besides, uploading and processing are different processes with MediaMax. The fact that processing doesn't run as it should doesn't mean uploading doesn't work. If they were to close up it would only mean that the upload flood is bigger when they do open up again. I'd like the old method better .... a (processing) tag behind a file indicates that it is successfully uploaded at least and that only processing is running behind.

Anonymous said...

I've been with SL since 2001, and just now do I finally throw in the towel. I was going to stick it out a while longer, but there's no point anymore. Nearly all of my files are gone, I'm talking some tens of thousands here. And then, like the website is pouring salt in my wounds, I'm left with approximately .005 percent of what was in my folders.

There's a mass exodus going on, all the old time streamload forums are changing, adding rapidshare, and torrents while phasing out streamload. People are leaving in droves, and that includes me. I'm sticking to demonoid from now on, they don't even ask for my money, much less take it and screw me out of my paid for services.

I'd like to go down to Cali 185 West F. Street Suite #430 and bitch slap Steve Iverson. Maybe I will one of these days, try to pry my lost files out of him somehow lol =)

Unknown said...

OK, so I found the right thread, sorry!

Same problem here with no uploads (except yesterday...I did get some things to upload, but back to the same ol', same ol' today.

I still have non-functioning links, but a few of them have recovered.

It's now 5 days since this MM blog entry. Poor communication with their clients doesn't even describe it...how about abysmal?

Anonymous said...

Thought this topic was the most suitable topic I could post in, but I nearly dropped out of my chair when I found an email from John Hood in my mail yesterday. It seems he still works there.

Unfortunately no reply on 2 mails I send him earlier ... instead of that I got a link to MMs FTP portal program for evaluation purposes which, I'm sorry to report, still needs some major work.

- speed is as slow as MM XL (couldn't get it to go over 12Kbyte. By the looks of it running multiple FTP sessions won't help either as the 12Kbyte I got, got divided over the multiple FTP sessions)
- the portal program showed a never ending avalanche of first one, and later two, errors
- the program turned out to be resource hog claiming an average 90% CPU

I don't know if these problems are problems on it's own or that they are related, but whatever the case this needs fixing first so I'm waiting on a new beta version to put my teeth in. I hope that is more forthcoming though then MMs own program MM XL that I tested a couple of weeks ago as I haven't seen anything since I reported my feedback on that.

For those curious how the portal program works. Basically you install the portal program and run it. When you have done that you start up the FTP program of your choice and make it connect to the portal program which then will act as an intermediate between your FTP program and MediaMax itself.

Hoping to see more progress .. on all aspects of MediaMax.