I am trying to upload one or more images to VPhot. Whether I try a FITS image (20MB) or a zip thereof (18MB) or multiple images zipped (176MB) the little progress bar gets up to 30-70% then resets to zero and starts over again multiple times. The upload never succeeds. My upload speed is very slow - 100KB/s (living at the lake.) Does that just make VPhot unusable for me? I can try it from another site with faster internet.
My main interest is to look at the diagnostics it provides for a time series so I can try to implement them in my own personal pipelines.
Richard:
What you just described the upload bar doing is the normal operation of the upload bars. The image upload bars are NOT ‘resetting’ but succeeding and moving on to the next image in the queue. The fact that you saw this happening multiple times indicates that the images were being uploaded?
Have you ever successfully uploaded images to VPhot before? Do you have the necessary fits headers present? What software did you use to collect/generate them?The 20 MB size is not a deal breaker BUT large images and a very slow upload speed may be a problem.
It would certainly be useful to try the upload process on a faster connection to see what happens.
Comments?
Ken
BTW, I could easily share some time series images to you if you actually only want to take a look at the diagnostics.
Ken
Hi Ken:
It happens even when trying to upload a single image. And if it is restarting for each individual image (which seems unlikely when I’m uploading a zip file - how would it know where one ends and the next begins) it seems to me it should be reaching 100% before starting over. But it never does.
Richard
Have you successfully uploaded an image before?
Ken
Months ago, yes. And in fact this evening I managed to upload a series of images. Firstly five images one at a time all successfully, then 7 in a group which went with only two of them needing a second attempt. So I guess it’s perhaps a combination of my slow connection and a busy server? So I guess the issue is closed. Thanks for your help Ken.
Hi Ken,
I saw this message and it describes a problem I have encountered many times in at least the past six months. I have successfully uploaded many thousands of images in the past using the same telescope setup files and quick upload. Sometimes, I have no problems and other times I see exactly what Richard has described. I’ll have a list of 50 or 100 images and the bar will progress for the top images in the list and when it gets part way (sometimes near the end or others right at the start - it appears to be random) the bar will reset and the attempted images will drop to the bottom of the list. If I let it go for much longer than the usual upload time, occasionally some of the files will load. Sometimes the entire list will load during an hour or so. At other times, there will be no images loaded. My images have complete headers and they are already plate solved when I upload them. I have fast internet connections at both work and home. I have had this happen many times at both locations with at least five different computers running Windows, MacOS, and Linux. On other occasions, I have no problems with even sometimes identical files that would not load on a previous day. It has happened at times when the system is busy and it has happened when there are no other files being loaded. I have not been able to find a pattern in the failure to load and it think it is random. Sometimes it will behave like this all day and other times after I have waited an hour or two and had it work fine. I haven’t loaded any files since the meeting but before that, I had this happen many times in late October and early November. It has been a frustrating experience. I can usually upload several hundred files in half an hour or less. When the system is acting up, I sometimes give up or have only a few files load after trying for several hours.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Mike
I have also had this issue - often things work well, but sometimes the uploads just don’t work, resetting multiple times, whether it’s one image or many, and whether I try the Upload Wizard or the regular upload. Of course, it’s usually when I’m trying to report something in a timely matter that I encounter problems.
I also occasionally have the issue that the files upload, but then don’t appear in my Images list, even after refreshing or logging out. I suspect that might be a file format issue on my end, as I changed my pre-processing routine recently and that’s when I first noticed this.
So, Richard and Mike’s experiences have happened to me as well.
Richard, Mike, Scott et al:
Thanks for your reports! George and I would obviously love to figure out what the source of this frequent problem is.
As I watch an upload proceed, the current upload page exhibits many blank upload bars that fill part of my screen. Images move in groups of 5 images. The first one of the five fills first and the other four proceed to fill subsequently. Then the next five start to process as the first five did. Is that what you see also? They move quickly for me most of the time so it is hard to look at the name below each bar to know if they are simply individually moving up in the queue of five or moving in groups of five. Does this make sense? What do you see? I’m going to ask the programmer of this feature, what is expected.
Sometimes the movement ceases entirely and at this point I know that it is not likely to restart so I give up, log out, log back in and try again. This usually works. Do you try something similar?
Scott: I agree with your suspicion that changing your pre-processing routine has caused this problem to appear. I think that is a common issue. It is truly annoying how many processing programs fail to put in standard fits headers that Maxim (my old standard) always seems to use. What did you change in your process?
The fact that the process works sometimes and not others is certainly confusing. The vphot code has not changed so what is the cause? It seems to me that internet timing issues between my computer and the AWS cloud are at fault but I have no real idea! Larger images and slow internet speeds are certainly not helpful.
Ken