Significant performance issues began happening late afternoon Eastern time on 1 March and continue today. Continually getter booted off and page loads taking a long time. Performance was fine during the day on 1 March.
Date
Votes
28 comments
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Geni Support Team Official comment Hi All,
We're experiencing very high traffic from recent publicity. We apologize for the slowness and any inconvenience, we are working to stabilize the site.
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Michael Levy I agree the performance of Geni has been absolutely diabolical. It has been virtually unusuable for me since and including yesterday evening. Since i signed up as a Pro user it has always been unacceptably slow all the time. If they don't get it up to standard, I shall not be recommending it to my large family as I hoped. Also I am thinking about putting bad reviews on comparison websites and Genealogy blogs.
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator There was a flurry of news articles after the publication in Science of a new study using the Geni World Family Tree. This caused millions of people to hit the site, slowing it down. Geni says it expects the problem to die down in a day or two. The good news is that many more people now know about Geni and may come to collaborate on this platform.
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Dale Nelson The bad news is as these many more people come to collaborate, you can expect the performance of Geni to go to a snails pace.
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Dale Nelson Mean while I can not get into the project, where I do most of my work in Geni..what am I getting for what I am paying for...
Geni's servers are overloaded.
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Michael Natter Hornbostel For a view weeks the server performance is getting worse and worse. It is practically not possible to work with geni
Michael Natter Hornbostel
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Beth Marie Beeman Brilliant. How about stopping publicity until you can handle the traffic? Also, it's been going on all day. Geni - please post an update.
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Markku Karjalainen Geni Pro $119.40/year
No response, just "Geni is overloaded", This is ridiculous.
Can't even use it.
Why you don't start new virtual instanced to provide availability for paying customers.
What's wrong with you guys there in Geni?
Have you ever heard what's load balancing?
Shape up now.
-Markku->
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator The increased traffic is still over 10x normal, so they are working on it. Please be patient.
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Markku Karjalainen Look’s like Geni doesn’t have servers running outside of US.
Only one service point in US data center. No load balancing.
That explains why there’s no service for users in Europe, when traffic increase.
Pay full and get what you can.
Great.
-Markku->
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Markku Karjalainen Here we go:
Type Domain Name IP Address TTL
A geni.com 107.154.108.111
Incapsula Inc (AS19551) 60 minJust one access point in Silicon Valley:
Source: whois.arin.netIP Address: 107.154.108.111Name: INCAPSULA-NETWORKHandle: NET-107-154-0-0-1Registration Date: 12/2/13Range: 107.154.0.0-107.154.255.255Org: Incapsula IncOrg Handle: INCAP-5Address: 3400 Bridge Parkway, Suite 200
City: Redwood ShoresState/Province: CAPostal Code: 94065Country: United StatesThis is really ridiculous.
-Markku->
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John Edward Walsh GENI sucks! Time to bail out.
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Markku Karjalainen Development of Geni has been disaster for years, still no working relationship calculator.
No changes to enter marriage at profile level.
They really don't care, when money comes in on every window.
This was really the final spot for me.
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator There is a working relationship calculator, so I am not sure what you meant.
You can edit a profile to add marriage information after the two married profiles have been added. Just click on the Relationship tab.Geni has a relatively small staff and this recent sustained flurry of activity due to a big news article came as a surprise (never happened in past 10 years) when they were out of town at a big genealogy conference.
It should be resolved next week. We had an episode like this once before when Geni went down for several days many years ago and things bounced back. The good news is that we'll have lots of new users on the site.
Stay tuned for further improvements that I have heard will be coming in a few months. -
Markku Karjalainen You should be aware about Geni relationship calculator. It’s a big joke!
I’ve spend hours and hours to reactivate relationships on wrongly calculated paths.
Marriage info should be much easier to enter, when adding a new profile. Now it’s not. Why?
I’m really surprised for the poor effort to respond for customer expectations on time.
You collect big money annually, but service is just in one point for whole world.
This is not desirable. There’s a high demand to provide reasonable service also in Europe. Right?
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Markku Karjalainen Just let me know how many pro-customers do you have, paying annual subscription?
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator I do not know how many subscribers there are. There are over 4 million users attached to the World Family Tree. I am a volunteer curator, not an employee.
I can tell you that Geni's relationship finder is the very best available. It is not a trivial computational task to find the shortest distance between two nodes in a network of 120 million. As a result, users get to refresh relationships only periodically, so you may need to wait a week or so to find the new relationship paths.
I agree that it would be great to add marriage info as you add a spouse. Maybe this feature will be added. I have asked for it also.
The service in Europe should be the same as in the United States. We have a lot of curators in your area. Have you found any of them? -
Beth Marie Beeman The article in question was about a paper published by someone in the Geni parent company, My Heritage. Geni even exacerbated the issue by publishing it's own version of the story on the Geni website. Cough. It was known. I know things "happen" - but there should be a recovery plan ... and we should not have to wait until they get home from a conference.
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Markku Karjalainen Who knows the actual amount of subscribers?
I can tell you, Geni relationship calculator doesn’t work.
I’ve been waiting for months to see if the calculator is able to do it’s work. Never happened. I started to build some relationships manually. It’s very time consuming.
The service in Europe is very slow. It’s not same than is US.
It just can’t be when servers are running in US, behind slow lines having congestions.
Response time is really not reasonable. Takes ~30 seconds to combine two profiles.
Even ping from finland takes 100-200 ms to Geni, for other US services it’s 5-10 times faster.
Is it a good service, no it’s not.
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Harald Tveit Alvestrand (Tveit) Yes, the current state of affairs is unfortunate. Unfortnuately, there is no way to predict which article will "take off" in the way this one has - it's been republished more than anything ever published about Geni before.
The servers you reach on www.geni.com aren't really Geni's servers - they're front-end servers from a company called Incapsula, which helps with caching and DDOS protection. The real Geni servers are behind that.
(Note: The distance from Finland to California means that the minimum time you can achieve is 70 ms round trip time. If you're seeing some time shorter than that, you're seeing an Europe-based front-end, not the California back-end.)
Keeping up with demand is always difficult when you have to trade off between the money spent on hardware, the money spent on development, and the money you earn from the customers. Geni's paying customer base isn't big enough to give it infinite resources, and its development team, while competent and dilligent, can't work miracles.
This traffic flare took everyone by surprise, and everyone who can is no doubt working as hard as they can to cope with it. At the moment, the only thing we who have no ability to improve things ourselves can do is to stay calm and wait.Harald
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Markku Karjalainen So, how many paying Pro subscribers Geni has?
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Harald Tveit Alvestrand (Tveit) They haven't told me, that's all I know.
Most companies want to keep such numbers to themselves unless they have a particular reason for publishing them; it's considered fiscally sensitive data.
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Hannele Naatula (Geni Curator, Limited Availability) If you are a pro user and a relationship path was not updated in the expected time, you can submit a help ticket to Customer Service and they will do the update. Here are the instructions how to do it:
https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/articles/229706307-How-to-Submit-a-Help-Ticket-If you cannot do it yourself I can do it for you, just send me the profile links.
I am also just a user and do not know about user counts, but yes, indeed, Geni's slowness is frustrating now.
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Markku Karjalainen Let’s assume Geni has only 2m Pro user’s worldwide, paying just awg $100 annually
It means 200m USD each year.
More than 500k per day, it’s really lot of money.
How much are the operative costs? Not much, maybe 10k/day max.
I’m just wondering where the 490k/day goes?
Who got this huge amount of money, not using it to provide reasonable services for paying customers?
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator I don’t know the number of pro users but I am very sure your number is way off. Most freemium websites are lucky to convert 1% into paying customers. Geni is doing fine, but it isn’t rolling in money.
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Harald Tveit Alvestrand (Tveit) For comparision: Ancestry.com (being a publicly traded US company) publishes some data.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com it has 1400 employees and 683 milliion USD in revenue (2015). Geni is a very small fraction of Ancestry's size.
Yes, 2M paying subscribers would be nice. But they're not there.
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Markku Karjalainen But nobody has numbers of Geni.
Weird.
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Erica Howton It’s not at all weird for private companies not to publish fiscal data. And anyway, you’re using your guesstimate to imply that Geni can afford to do better.
I agree, Geni can afford to do better. They continuously have improved in the years I’ve been a customer. They will continue to improve.
Publicity is unpredictable and managing web servers an art.
Pro members can refresh relationship paths weekly (well, not today ); curators can do so more frequently. We have a curators please assist public discussion that accommodates that kind of request.
Distant paths can get buggy from unresolved duplicates and so on, so keeping the tree clean is a way we can all help each other.
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