h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Traveller in Time looking down from UpsAndC
"It seems B363421 is not a valid blob ?
B763421 perhaps, it is just one digit off."

No, it's a valid blob on those occasions when the BBC's servers are actually working. Unfortunately that's rare enough to make many blobs invalid most of the time recently. If you refresh the page it might deign to appear though.

Traveller in Time refreshing until something shows
"Well, I did refresh a dozen times in Classic and Brunel.
But it did not show up once. It was also not in my library otherwise I would have kept trying.
Apparently I stopped scanning with some gaps between 300000 and 500000. .

Do you miss ?

I know the servers have some problems with low frequent requested images. At least that is my definition of the problem. It would also explain why new images show more often not than fast."

Well it was working last night - on and off. Sometimes it seems to matter which directory structure and white/blue terminator one uses. There isn't much to be done about it from this end. It's all the BBC's problem. They hadn't even been putting the images on some EG articles lately.

I split the Earth images into 2 groups because there were quite a lot. I normally only resort to adding the smileys in when there aren't very many blobs for a theme and they happen to usefully fill a gap.

I'm not sure I've seen the same sort of thing as you have with frequent or infrequent images. There are some problems with earlier ones because of changes to the site: goo was the only skin before anyway and then the images had to be moved to the BBC and then white was made the default. These things have conspired together to make for some strange results on specific images and batches of images, eg the santa ones.

Traveller in Time in the caches
"Recently it has been made possible to see all smilies on a single page in one go. Also the limit of 50 images per page seems to be enlarged (I have not really tested this one).
The only drawback seems to be some low frequent requested (new?) images need some requests to show up. And then they show up on all systems.

I checked these 'theories' using some six independend systems using two Internet Providers.
There is no matter of caching on my side. I see a different tracert path for each provider. Only the BBC side is similar.
Perhaps most of the times we get the images via a BBC cache?
Perhaps these caches also cache similar named images on an incompatible path?
Perhaps some image names are blacklisted on some servers?"

It always was possible to see all smileys on a single page.

I also had considered the possibility that not all the images had been installed on all the servers. There has been independent evidence of that but I haven't been routinely tracing routes/servers.

Traveller in Time on his head
"Sounds like a local cahe?
The only way to be sure of these kind of measurements is starting with an empty (low) cache.
Do not forget some applications have selective refresh for htm, ccs, img, cookies. .
I suspect the BBC servers of caching the DNA images, even beyond the DNA WEB servers.
hmm < A2741627 >"