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Behind the scenes at My Opera

Disappearing user pictures

By Cosimo Streppone. Tuesday, 24. March 2009, 17:21:03

,

Lately we have noticed two different problems, one with user pictures and another one with default avatars.

Sometimes it happens that user pictures just come up broken. For some reason, they don't show. This is a bit weird, and difficult to reproduce. Every time you try to reload the broken pictures, they misteriously show again.

We think we found out why. Analyzing static.myopera.com access logs, we found that some requests were being served as 503, which, according to the HTTP spec, is: 

10.5.4 503 Service Unavailable

   The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a
   temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication
   is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after
   some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a
   Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD
   handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

      Note: The existence of the 503 status code does not imply that a
      server must use it when becoming overloaded. Some servers may wish
      to simply refuse the connection.

So, 503s are sent to clients when the server can't serve more requests, or when there are bandwidth or requests per second limits. In fact, some months ago we set some per-client bandwidth and connection limits, to allow fair usage of resources for all our users. Now we have raised the limits a bit, and we're keeping the access log monitored, trying to minimize "503" errors.

Hopefully this should eliminate all the "missing-pictures" problems. Shout if you still see broken pictures.
About avatars, it might be a bit trickier, since avatars are not served from static.myopera.com, so it cannot be the same problem. So, is anyone in the community able to reproduce the "default-avatar-missing" problem with any browser?

Yet another performance optimization roundFace gestures on Slashdot

Comments

Cσησя Mμяρнỵ 24. March 2009, 17:24

I haven't noticed it.... but I'm pretty sure anybody who uses IE would have :lol:

thobi 24. March 2009, 17:31

my user picture has been broken too, no problem with the avatar yet. i even have been unable to delete my user picture, which has been shown in my profile but not near my name e.g. on the friends list :frown:
had to upload a new one. now it seems to work again :smile:

Tamil 24. March 2009, 17:33

:sherlock:

Carol 24. March 2009, 20:15

I use Opera and I see this problem.

Kyle Baker 24. March 2009, 20:24

I've noticed avatars that fail to load on various blogs. Hope it's all straight now. That was indeed an annoying issue, but I kept thinking it was my connection.

theoddbod 24. March 2009, 21:06

I've seen this happening since maybe October...sure I'd reported it at least once too :sherlock:

Andrew Nguyen 24. March 2009, 21:17

All avatars load fine for me, at least, I think they are. Uploading a new avatar takes awhile though... :sherlock:

Charles Schloss 25. March 2009, 01:30

I see it it from time to time but not always

Diego Schild 25. March 2009, 03:37

Everything is OK here.

Artur "Jurgi" Jurgawka 25. March 2009, 06:16

So, is anyone in the community able to reproduce the "default-avatar-missing" problem with any browser?


It seems to be completely random.

The Dark Furie 25. March 2009, 10:24

It tends to happen only with some people's avatars on each page, usually only those that have multiple comments on a post within blogs. Don't know if that helps but it's something I noticed about it, almost as if they're being called multiple times and the site is getting confused with it all.

For example, heavy users such as Tamil and I regularly have our avatars disappear on News posts while single commenters don't unless they have the default avatar which disappears regularly.

Using every mobile browser in existance, by the way.

Cosimo Streppone 25. March 2009, 17:25

Error rate has decreased dramatically today, so we expect less and less people to experience these problems.



Maybe if you're behind a proxy, or part of a big organization/network, than you can still experience some small problems here and there, but in general, everything should be fine for 99,9% of users.


OLASADE 13. April 2009, 16:48

I discovered a similar problem too but, in mine own case its while downloading. There would be a broken image. and atimes, is wordings, no software can open this image. Though not all picture but, common with extralarge pictures. There other ones that are are tags transparent it wouldn't show too.
Sometimes, I do have slow open-up problems.
These are some of the problems I do encounter with while browsing with my device (sony ericsson p990i)

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