"Processing image" stragglers

[sharding]

I've noticed that when I upload a bunch of photos, the vast majority of them process right away, but there are always a couple of stragglers. For example, I just uploaded this gallery (http://pix.seanh.com/Music/Carrie-Underwood-Everett-WA/12366648_QiYKH), which are all 1024x768 images (i.e. not massive). Looking at the log, the range of processing times is from under 30 seconds to 850 (nearly 15 minutes) in one extreme case.

I'm curious, is there something different about the files that take a long time to process, or is it just luck of the draw? More practically, is there anything I can do to make my images more likely to process quickly? It's always annoying when I want to share a gallery with someone, and I'm sitting around waiting for one last image to process when the others have been done for 20 minutes. Do higher account tiers get processing priority? If I upgraded to Pro, would this happen less often?

[Allen]

I've noticed that when I upload a bunch of photos, the vast majority of them process right away, but there are always a couple of stragglers. For example, I just uploaded this gallery (http://pix.seanh.com/Music/Carrie-Underwood-Everett-WA/12366648_QiYKH), which are all 1024x768 images (i.e. not massive). Looking at the log, the range of processing times is from under 30 seconds to 850 (nearly 15 minutes) in one extreme case.

I'm curious, is there something different about the files that take a long time to process, or is it just luck of the draw? More practically, is there anything I can do to make my images more likely to process quickly? It's always annoying when I want to share a gallery with someone, and I'm sitting around waiting for one last image to process when the others have been done for 20 minutes. Do higher account tiers get processing priority? If I upgraded to Pro, would this happen less often?
It all depends on when they get into the que no matter what account
level. I noticed uploading my last gallery that my photo numbers where at
least 200 apart. Even though I was uploading continuously a bunch of
other photos jumped in between.

[sharding]

In a way that makes sense. But if it's truly a single global first in, first out queue, something else is screwed up, because the one that took almost 15 minutes for me was in the middle of the pack (in order of upload). And if it's not a single global queue (as I suspect it's not), it would seem that either the balancing of the queues/processing instances isn't even (the straggler landed on an overloaded instance), and/or some of them are processing things dramatically more slowly than others.

Basically, if all the images require the same processing (from a computational resources standpoint), and the range of processing times is as wide as I'm seeing, something isn't working like it should be. Slow processing at times of high load is understandable, but the distribution of times shouldn't be so broad.

[rainforest1155]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay yesterday. Our system was extremely busy processing photos all day long as far as I know due to the holiday weekend. I don't know of processing queue details, but the system should be performing properly. Due to the fact that we use multiple processing servers, photos not always process in the same order they were uploaded. That's normal.

I checked your upload log and all your photos from yesterday seem to have processed fine.

Sebastian