One of the things stopping me hugging and embracing Zooomr is how slow it is for me to view images off their servers. Take for example the image on this post on Thomas Hawk’s blog. There are two things wrong with it:
- It’s 241k, but it downloads on my fast shiny broadband connection like it’s ten times bigger. Brings me back to the good old days of dialup and a modem connection. Remember how that was? Oh, there’s the connection made, first bit of the image, oh oh, a small bit more, half way there, yawn, zzzzzz. I’ve fallen asleep.
- It’s not cachable. Every time you reload that page the whole image has to download again. Go check out what the cacheability engine thinks.
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http://static.zooomr.com/images/265853_8ec115b6db.jpg
Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:30 GMT
Expires –
Cache-Control –
Last-Modified –
ETag –
Content-Length 241.9K (247754)
Server lighttpd/1.4.13This object will be considered stale, because it doesn’t have any freshness information assigned. It doesn’t have a validator present.
Compare that with the image from my previous post:
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https://inphotos.org/wp-content/flickr/322052492_c728e66f9e_o.jpg
Date Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:24:50 GMT
Expires –
Cache-Control –
Last-Modified 2 min 28 sec ago (Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:22:22 GMT) validated
ETag –
Content-Length 127.2K (130220)
Server Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)This object doesn’t have any explicit freshness information set, so a cache may use Last-Modified to determine how fresh it is with an adaptive TTL (at this time, it could be, depending on the adaptive percent used, considered fresh for: 29 sec (20%), 1 min 14 sec (50%), 2 min 28 sec (100%)). It can be validated with Last-Modified. The clock on this Web server appears to be set incorrectly; this can cause problems when calculating freshness.
Despite the problems reported above the image is cached by my browser and even with a force reload, it loads quicky.
I’m not sure how to fix the first problem except by adding a faster pipe to the servers hosting the data or upgrading the hosting hardware, but the second problem is very easy to fix using eTags and better headers. There are numerous tutorials and even code examples out there. Please, please, please look into it and make your images more cacheable! Your European neighbours will really appreciate it!
7 replies on “Is Zooomr slow for you too?”
Hi there, and thanks for taking the time to profile this…
I understand what you are talking about and am working on a fix, though in the mean time, could you post a traceroute to static.zooomr.com v. static.flickr.com?
I’m curious — we might be switching ISPs soon 🙂
-Kristopher
Thanks for responding so quickly Kristopher! Here’s the traceroute:
$ /usr/sbin/traceroute static.zooomr.com
traceroute to static.zooomr.com (66.35.203.51), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 66.35.203.51 (66.35.203.51) 2.348 ms 2.047 ms 1.866 ms
2 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.015 ms 2.989 ms 6.504 ms
3 bas503.cwt.esat.net (193.95.136.239) 18.737 ms 18.031 ms 18.056 ms
4 vlan500.rt502.cwt.esat.net (193.95.136.125) 22.113 ms 19.021 ms 91.701 ms
5 vlan52.rt001.cwt.esat.net (193.95.130.145) 18.353 ms 18.484 ms 18.929 ms
6 ge3-0.br003.cwt.esat.net (193.95.129.6) 18.540 ms 18.804 ms 18.459 ms
7 213.242.106.133 (213.242.106.133) 19.833 ms 20.482 ms 20.305 ms
8 so-6-0.hsa1.dublin1.level3.net (4.68.115.25) 19.543 ms 19.318 ms 18.307 ms
9 so-4-1-0.bbr1.london1.level3.net (4.68.128.113) 28.847 ms 34.664 ms 28.872 ms
10 ae-12-55.car2.london1.level3.net (4.68.116.144) 30.388 ms ae-12-51.car2.london1.level3.net (4.68.116.16) 31.109 ms 29.609 ms
11 bcr1-ge-6-1-0.londonlnx.savvis.net (206.24.169.29) 41.852 ms 37.661 ms 36.586 ms
12 bcs2-so-1-1-0.londonlnx.savvis.net (204.70.193.122) 36.551 ms bcs1-so-1-1-0.londonlnx.savvis.net (204.70.193.114) 35.858 ms bcs2-so-1-1-0.londonlnx.savvis.net (204.70.193.122) 65.477 ms
13 bcs2-so-0-0-0.newyork.savvis.net (204.70.192.121) 108.931 ms 108.296 ms 110.302 ms
14 bcs1-so-6-0-0.newyork.savvis.net (204.70.192.37) 108.785 ms bcs2-so-0-0-0.newyork.savvis.net (204.70.192.121) 108.017 ms bcs1-so-6-0-0.newyork.savvis.net (204.70.192.37) 108.423 ms
15 bcs2-so-4-0-0.washington.savvis.net (204.70.192.1) 116.513 ms dcr2-so-3-0-0.chicago.savvis.net (204.70.192.101) 145.714 ms bcs2-so-4-0-0.washington.savvis.net (204.70.192.1) 171.304 ms16 dcr2-so-0-0-0.dallas.savvis.net (204.70.192.98) 155.704 ms dcr2-so-7-1-0.atlanta.savvis.net (204.70.192.61) 126.181 ms 124.963 ms
17 dcr2-so-2-0-0.dallas.savvis.net (204.70.192.70) 167.994 ms 189.126 ms 166.964 ms
18 dcr1-so-6-0-0.dallas.savvis.net (204.70.192.49) 145.924 ms 143.375 ms 144.243 ms
19 dcr2-so-2-0-0.losangeles.savvis.net (204.70.192.86) 182.888 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (208.172.156.198) 208.527 ms dcr2-so-2-0-0.losangeles.savvis.net (204.70.192.86) 190.207 ms
20 csr11-ve243.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (66.35.194.106) 200.406 ms 198.559 ms 199.495 ms
21 66.35.203.51 (66.35.203.51) 209.389 ms 209.404 ms 208.325 ms
and to Flickr:
$ /usr/sbin/traceroute static.flickr.com
traceroute to storage1.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.213.135), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 storage1.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.213.135) 2.396 ms 1.945 ms 1.865 ms
2 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 3.070 ms 2.989 ms 2.969 ms
3 bas503.cwt.esat.net (193.95.136.239) 20.051 ms 17.690 ms 19.356 ms
4 vlan501.rt501.cwt.esat.net (193.95.137.124) 19.221 ms 19.375 ms 22.656 ms
5 vlan53.rt002.cwt.esat-x.com (193.95.130.153) 18.462 ms 18.646 ms 19.717 ms
6 ge2-0.br002.cwt.esat.net (193.95.129.21) 19.223 ms 19.105 ms 19.153 ms
7 t2a4-p9-1.nl-ams2.eu.bt.net (166.49.153.129) 36.791 ms 35.973 ms 36.228 ms
8 t2c1-ge6-0.nl-ams2.eu.bt.net (166.49.200.11) 36.243 ms 36.853 ms 36.724 ms
9 t2c1-p1-0.uk-lon2.eu.bt.net (166.49.195.226) 42.847 ms 44.170 ms 42.761 ms
10 * * *
11 t2c1-p5-0.us-nyb.eu.bt.net (166.49.208.157) 117.194 ms 115.929 ms 115.977 ms
12 ixp1-p4-0.us-nyb.eu.bt.net (166.49.163.50) 116.767 ms 117.687 ms 116.031 ms
13 equinixexchange-nyc.yahoo.com (206.223.131.16) 115.764 ms 115.416 ms 116.585 ms
14 vl182.bas2.dal.yahoo.com (216.115.96.100) 148.948 ms vl817.bas1-m.dal.yahoo.com (216.115.98.101) 162.366 ms vl176.bas1.dal.yahoo.com (216.115.96.98) 314.884 ms
15 ge-0-1-0-p101.msr1.mud.yahoo.com (216.115.104.99) 150.698 ms ge-0-1-0-p130.msr2.mud.yahoo.com (216.115.104.85) 163.951 ms ge-1-1-0-p100.msr1.mud.yahoo.com (216.115.104.105) 160.440 ms
16 v204.bas4.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.209.7) 155.512 ms v203.bas3.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.209.5) 165.156 ms v204.bas4.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.209.7) 152.630 ms
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It looks like Flickr have some firewalls along the route that don’t respond well to traceroute packets. Hopefully that’ll be useful to you!
[…] I can’t recommend Zooomr either because their service is so slow – images take an age to download, and when they do download, they aren’t cached by the […]
seriously slow today. took me five times as long to do the same tasks vs flickr.
also it appears to change gifs into jpgs. pretty annoying if you want to upload an animated gif.
and they never reply to their emails and you have to be a blogger to have them even show an interest in your problems.
slow ass hell.
[…] back in December I asked, Is Zooomr slow for you too? and was heartened when Kristopher Tate said he was working on a fix. Hopefully the fix is part of […]