Guide: Why is Content Upload slow
Possible Reasons for Slow Content Upload and ways to avoid slow load
First of all, please keep in mind that ModelCentro does not limit your uploading speed in any way — we take as much bandwidth as your Internet Service Provider will allow.
In general, the amount of time it takes to upload a video or a photoset to ModelCentro is outside of our control.
If your upload is slower than expected, it could be due to multiple factors, including:
1. Internet connection. This is a very important factor that can affect the upload process. So, here’s what can go wrong:
- Lower overall upload speeds provided by your particular Internet plan
- Time of day / peak hours of usage with your Internet Service Provider
- Increased traffic on your local network
- Incorrect network, firewall, or router settings
Of course, for a simple check you can go to speedtest.net and check your upload speed, then check with your Internet Service Provider what the up speed is for your Internet plan. However when testing your upload speeds, keep in mind that online “speed tests” are not always accurate. The results you receive from these tests may be skewed by the location of the test server, as well as the factors listed above. Several sequent speed tests can also show you very different results.
2. Hardware and software.
Sometimes the content upload time will slow down significantly if you have other programs running. Other programs may both load your CPU (hence slow down your computer - depending on hardware you have) and use up the Internet connection.
For example, if you have an email inbox open or are logged in to any of your social network pages, the resources your computer uses to keep those pages open will affect the speed needed to upload your content.
To speed up your connection you can try to:
- stop all file sharing programs and other download or upload processes
- use wired internet connection or if you're using wi-fi or mobile broadband try to get the strongest signal possible
- close unused tabs in your browser
- do a virus and spyware scan of your computer
3. Content amount and quality. This is pretty obvious, but still worth mentioning. If you upload 100 photos, 3Mb each or a 4GB video - it can take some time. So generally, the better content quality is, the slower the upload will be.
If you need to upload, say, 20 videos at once - it’s also not a good idea to start these processes simultaneously (for all the reasons mentioned above). For bulk content uploads, please use BitTorrent (see guide on this here).
ModelCentro is now working on making the upload process more transparent - so you can stay in control of what's happening and be notified on how things are going - for example, we will show your upload speed and estimated time till the upload is done, as well as bring content upload status to content lists so you could monitor all content items being uploaded at a glance. We hope this will help to understand which of the causes listed above slows your work and prevent further frustration.
Also, we're adding some additional testing and monitoring tools on our end in order to better understand how we can improve. Just a quick example - recently we've been struggling with browser native function when it aborted connection while uploading a big file. To resolve this issue we've implemented files chunking before upload - it's when a big file is split on many smaller size parts and each part is uploaded separately. So, something that was rather a browser issue and not ours, but we found a way to deal with it. Such cases are numerous and each web service which deals with file upload is facing it - just try to google "dropbox slow upload" for example, or "youtube slow upload" and you will see how many users have complained and shared their tips on upload speed.