PBase

I have been in contact with help/customers services since the beginning of the New Year re my profile being slow to load. It doesn't matter what/whose device I try my profile on it is the same, 'waiting for css.pbase.com' It took 16 minutes to upload the last single photo I posted! I initially received good customer service until it got to the point where an 'administrator' needed to check my account, that's when everything came to an immediate halt. I paid my membership/subscription in January 2015 but have since had this refunded by PayPal as the service I am getting is not what I paid for. Once my account is 'fixed' and up and running as it was pre 2015 I will renew membership/subscription, but until then I am posting elsewhere!

(At the risk of sounding like a shill for PBase ....)

I sometimes wonder if these sorts of reports are a result of some kind of regional Internet problem. When I just read your post, I clicked on your name and within a second your profile page was in front of me, maps and colorful flags and all. I am in southeastern Pennsylvania, USA, (admittedly on a 25 Mbit FiOS line) and I've been uploading shots and editing some stuff in my galleries just about daily the last couple of weeks and have not seen any notable difficulty. It's not always instantaneous but seldom more than a 2 or 3 second delay if there is one.

Dunno -- maybe from your time zone you're hitting during a backup process or something?

As to the level of PBase interaction with its customers -- yay verily, it's hard to argue with you about that. One occasionally wonders if it's some sort of absentee landlord setup.

I wish you better luck,
DaveT

Thanks Dave (dw_thomas) but is def a problem with my profile/account/galleries. I can access anyone else without a problem. Virtually no delay once my profile has loaded but click on one of my own images and I have massive delays with the 'waiting for css.pbase.com...' just sitting on the left hand bottom bar and nothing happening. I have tried at various times of the day/night, on various computers/devices and no change when trying to access my account. Most annoying! Up until early January 2015 I have had no problems. Wish admin would get this fixed!

For me (in SW FL) my galleries and images and DaveT's galleries and images (as well as others) load for viewing very quickly within 1 or 2 seconds.

I don't know where the problem is, for your galleries and images but on every level they load slow - 'consistently' at between 20 and 25 sec. The only page of yours that opens quickly for me is your profile page. Everything else of yours is very slow.

Wish I could help you figure things out but all I can do is provide more data on the situation.

I'm in southern California and it is zzzzzzzzzzzzzz slow as hell lately!

rsbfotos wrote:For me (in SW FL) my galleries and images and DaveT's galleries and images (as well as others) load for viewing very quickly within 1 or 2 seconds.

I don't know where the problem is, for your galleries and images but on every level they load slow - 'consistently' at between 20 and 25 sec. The only page of yours that opens quickly for me is your profile page. Everything else of yours is very slow.

Wish I could help you figure things out but all I can do is provide more data on the situation.

This prompted me to take another look. Again, Pam's profile page came in quickly. Then I clicked on the 'All Galleries' link and there was quite a lag, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, I didn't actually time it. There are a fairly large number of inages on that page, so I thought maybe that's a problem. But clicking on sub-galleries, those I tried came in pretty promptly.

My only perhaps useless observation is that some of Pam's images are available in a rather large original size. I have no insider knowledge of how PBase deals with that -- if every time an image is displayed the internal magic has to scale down a multi-megabyte JPG file, that might be problematic in terms of time. If they do in fact cache smaller version of the file, I'd expect less penalty -- but I have no idea what they actually do. I also vaguely recall sometime back (maybe a year ago?) they relocated the actual image file storage to some third party servers. I bring this up because I have 99.8% of my stuff trimmed to 800 pixels max and a mid level of JPEG compression, so most of my image files are 90 to 150K or so, not megabytes.

(Or mayhaps all your traffic does two passes through NSA scanners -- many mysteries in this world! )

DaveT

pamrussell wrote:I have been in contact with help/customers services since the beginning of the New Year re my profile being slow to load. It doesn't matter what/whose device I try my profile on it is the same, 'waiting for css.pbase.com' It took 16 minutes to upload the last single photo I posted! I initially received good customer service until it got to the point where an 'administrator' needed to check my account, that's when everything came to an immediate halt. I paid my membership/subscription in January 2015 but have since had this refunded by PayPal as the service I am getting is not what I paid for. Once my account is 'fixed' and up and running as it was pre 2015 I will renew membership/subscription, but until then I am posting elsewhere!

Using IE11's debugger (yes there are some good things about IE11) network analysis tool, it shows the following CSS taking over 20s to load and then fail.
http://css.pbase.com/styles/128967.css

You can test this yourself by just creating a new browser session (to prevent the caching of the css) and try to access the CSS url. Also, if you do not have IE11 then you can test your website speed using: http://www.webpagetest.org/

In addition to the IE11 tools there are others like Firebug, Fiddler2 etc, but I found the IE11 network tool very easy to use.

Dave's comment about third party servers also rings a cobweb bell in my head. I also thought at one time pbase.com used Akamai which usually is very fast, but there can be some hiccups with caching.

Oh...almost forgot...that one CSS file is not the only thing causing a slow response. Several other items like Function.call and other CSS styles are taking more than 10s to load. However, in several tries I never saw a 16 minute wait which to me sounds like either caching issue or a DNS/routing issue.

Many thanks all. My galleries are using 728 Megabytes of storage space so I don't think this can be the problem. The slowness started in early January 2015. Up until then my account has had no issues. My frustration is the lack of response/action by the 'administrator'! Clearly they don't read the forums or if they do they decide to ignore problems. I have not received a response to my last email in early February.

Is Pbase going under!