Why is Flickr so slow/broken? OS X!

July 10, 2007 12:49 PM

Why is Flickr so very very beyond slow and maybe broken, sometimes (OS X)?

I'm rockin' OS X (Tiger) and all my browsers (Safari, Firefox, Camino) load Flickr slower than slow. Half the time it doesn't load fully at all: when searching, half or more of the photos won't display and the browser will sit there indefinitely, loading the page. Same thing happens on individual photo pages. It seems to happen less frequently if I'm only loading one Flickr page at a time (as opposed to lots of tabs, which is what I'm trying to do), but it still happens.

Is this just Flickr being Flickr? Is there some setting I can set or browser I can use that can fix this?

posted by wemayfreeze to computers & internet (16 comments total)

I get bouts of extremely poor responsiveness from Flickr now and then, cross-browser in XP. It'll be lousy one evening and then fine later or the next day. So it may just be Flickr bieng Flickr.

Doing some sort of browser-independent network test against the site might help settle the question, but I have no particularly good suggestions there.
posted by cortex at 1:04 PM on July 10, 2007

Hunh. I'm on OS X as well, and I find flickr is generally snappy. Once in a while it seems to be napping, but moments like that pass quickly.

It seems more likely to me that there's just a lot of latency between your place and flickr's server farm, because of a lot of hops, a bum router somewhere in the chain, that sort of thing. It would be instructive, if you really want to get into this, to run ping and traceroute to flickr.com (you can do this by firing up Applications/Utilities/Network Utility), and get a friend with a non-Mac laptop to come over and do the same over your connection. I'd be surprised if your friend got significantly faster throughput than you.

Running traceroute myself, it seems to get balled up at a Yahoo node after 9 hops, which isn't surprising. Running ping, I get min/avg/max ping times of 15.937/24.530/39.353 ms
posted by adamrice at 1:45 PM on July 10, 2007

Hm, you might be onto something. I get slowed up at Yahoo after 22 hops, which seems like it might be excessive.

Pings aren't going through, I think due to something at the company I'm working for.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:56 PM on July 10, 2007

Maybe off-topic but somebody posted the following response when I once asked about this:

Web 2.0x slower

In other words, Flickr is just one of many web 2.0 apps that's s-l-o-w. I think it's because web 2.0 apps are built on such a heavy framework of database access, plus media-heavy accesses.

Personally I just don't click on Flickr links nowadays, because I know my chances of seeing the picture are around 50/50. If I do get to see the picture, it will be after 5-10 seconds wait. I've got better things to do.
posted by humblepigeon at 2:29 PM on July 10, 2007

I have a very similar experience on my laptop (Ubuntu / Firefox) and my home machine as well (OSX / Firefox or Safari). It's gotten bad enough that I just don't even use Flickr any more, and I let my subscription expire.
posted by bshort at 2:37 PM on July 10, 2007

I am on OS X, and I find Flickr unusable. I thought it was just me. This was interesting to read.
posted by astruc at 3:21 PM on July 10, 2007

OSX user here, and I can't stand Flickr. It's just plain slow, and the pic when you finally get it is pretty small anyway.

My brother is a PC user with a pretty new machine and he feels the same way about it, FWIW.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 3:34 PM on July 10, 2007

I'm on XP with a fast commercial internet connection and dual Xeon workstation.

I find Flickr painfully slow.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 4:15 PM on July 10, 2007

Ditto. XP. Flickr. Molasses.
posted by iguanapolitico at 4:43 PM on July 10, 2007

When Flickr did that big redesign a while back it became really slow. Also broke some of the functionality (the new design has very low usability in several places) and just generally became a lot more annoying. It was literally an overnight change and is totally linked to the redesign, and has persisted ever since. I've seen it on my Win 200 and my Vista machines, Firefox, IE6, IE7, and on someone else's internet connection/fast computer (so it's not just me).

I figure that it's just not designed for the slow broadband we get in NZ and is the usual 2.0 arrogance that expects everyone to have access to the same level of technology.
posted by shelleycat at 5:33 PM on July 10, 2007

Gah, that should be Win 2000 of course.
posted by shelleycat at 5:33 PM on July 10, 2007

astruc: "I am on OS X, and I find Flickr unusable. I thought it was just me. This was interesting to read."

Me too!
posted by loiseau at 5:48 PM on July 10, 2007

another OS X user, and flickr is painful to use. I've constantly wondered how it managed to become such a fixture of the social internet.

Just rang ping, got these results:
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 96.369/97.875/100.152/1.020 ms

~23 hops to yahoo.

I'm glad it's not just me.
posted by Arturus at 6:15 PM on July 10, 2007

Interesting. Just as a counterpoint, I get similar pingtimes and I don't really have problems with it. But then again I always tend to use it during weird hours (EST).

PING www.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.214.24): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 68.142.214.24: icmp_seq=0 ttl=48 time=61.025 ms
...
--- www.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 58.979/69.251/93.173/10.216 ms

16 hops in traceroute before I hit the first yahoo.com server. (It craps out after 17 hops and stops reporting anything, so I'm not sure what happens once it's inside Yahoo.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:51 PM on July 10, 2007

Sounds like the future isn't so perfect after all, eh peoples? So it goes. Thanks for all the points of reference and commiseration. Next time I'm frustrated with Flickr, I'll say "Flickr is slow for me, too." And y'all be right beside me—somewhere out there—frustrated.
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:58 PM on July 10, 2007

I personally don't find it that slow, but it's kind of ironic that I just ordered this book.
posted by bertrandom at 1:51 AM on July 11, 2007