Saturday, June 10, 2006

Frustration with Blogger Mounting....

I think I'm going to "fire" blogger and switch to another setup. It is just taking way too long to do anything and more than 50% of the times I can't get pictures uploaded without having to go through the motions several times, only to have zero pictures uploaded. If I come back the next day, I can upload them. It's as if certain periods during the day or night it just can't handle all the traffic it gets.

It doesn't matter if it is at home in the morning on my computer, or during lunch on my workstation, which is far more powerful than my home computer. In fact, right around 11:00am is one of the worst times to be on.

I understand that having many photos could make republishing slow, but is there anything else I can do to speed up blogger or is this problem totally on their end? It doesn't seem to matter if it is my home computer, or the computer at work on my lunch hour - slow, slow, slow. Something that should take 15 minutes is routinely taking an hour with all the misfires and the like. Just clicking on "template", depending on the time of day, in this case 10:00am, was taking so long I was able to refill my coffee and brush my teeth as I waited.

Is anyone else experiencing this? What alternatives should I consider and why?

I gave up trying to post photos today. Just clicking on the photo upload icon took about a minute for the window to open.

EDIT: Now that I can get back in, I see they were planning maintenance right when I was trying to work. And, that led me to this:

Friday, June 09, 2006
Late last night we pushed new code and once again replaced harware in order to combat the problems of the past few days. As of this morning it appears to have improved the responsiveness of the site, altho' there are still fixes we want to make to get Blogger faster for everyone.Also, we are working on fixing the problems some users are seeing with photo upload failures.


Thursday, June 08, 2006
For many users, Blogger will have been extremely slow or down for most of the morning. We continue to work on fixes for this problem and hope to have it resolved as quickly as possible.Update (4:45p): We are planning another infrastructure overhaul to address the significant problems we've been having in the past several days.Update (6:59p): We've made another change that has improved performance, but we are also planning to make additional changes this evening.Update (10:45a, June 9): The issues with the database servers have been resolved last night.
Posted by Jason at
11:14 PDT

Wednesday, June 07, 2006
This morning, a hardware problem we had been struggling with over the past several days suddenly worsened. As a result, and to stave off future downtime, we have had to take Blogger down for an extended period of time as we address the problem. We will continue to update this blog and the homepage with more information.Update: We've brought up new hardware which has allowed us to restore the site. We try hard to avoid downtimes of this length and apologize for the inconvenience.
Posted by Jason at
15:37 PDT

Monday, June 05, 2006
Photo uploading will be disabled for 30 minutes this evening starting at 10pm (Pacific Time).Update: This is taking longer than expected. Hopefully we will be done by 11:45pm (Pacific Time). We will update as we learn more.Update: We are now finished. Thank you for your patience.


Posted by Jason at 15:46 PDT

In all fairness to these people, I'll sit back and wait a while before exploring other services. They acknowledge the problems and are working to resolve them. Hopefully, blogger will running smoothly soon so we can get in and out.

The photo problem I was having is also acknowledged on their board so I'm willing to wait it out and give them a chance.