Extremely Large Images are Temporarily Blocked

Revised August 5, 2015 This content is archived.

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The UBCMS has suffered several server outages in recent weeks due to extremely large images. These images will now be blocked in the author environment.

This is No Longer an Issue

A more efficient resizing algorithm has been added to Author, ameliorating these concerns. > more details

Background

There have been four UBCMS server outages in the last six weeks. The outages were all caused by the server processing and resizing extremely high resolution images uploaded by authors. While these large images may not immediately lock up the servers, they are high risk because combined with other things the servers are doing at the same time, the initial rendering of these images causes the servers to run out of memory.

We are taking two paths to deal with this problem.

The Immediate and Short Term Solution

Effective immediately, all images wider or taller than 4,000 pixels will be blocked.
(This step was implemented Friday, July 31 around 1:30 p.m.)

If your page has an image that is a extremely large file size:

On author: a red 'X' with a message to resize the image will be displayed. 

On your live site: a white placeholder image will be displayed when the image is first loaded. We expect this to affect less than 1% of images in the entire UBCMS.

If your live site gets a 'white image' we will know and we will fix this for you. To accomplish this we will be regularly reviewing a report of images on published pages affected by this and manually fixing them, so the white replacement should not last more than one business day. Please note that a user has to visit your live page for the photo to load and the white image to show up, this is why we will be reviewing regularly and fixing daily.

Authors have the option of course of fixing this themselves. They can re-publish these pages with smaller sized image files if they choose.

The Longer Term Solution

As our number one priority, we will be pursuing making the servers handle large images seamlessly. We do not want authors to need to worry about resizing high resolution images from cameras or high-quality download sites. 

This may take a week or two to develop and test, after which time we will be able to safely remove the size limit.

Regards,
The DCT Help Team