Queue full + call to action

Listen, what can we do as a group of thousands to hold GF accountable? EVERY single day this week I have encountered the BS “queue full”.

We are pretty much all small business owners and this is crunch time. I’m fed up. I have events basically the next six consecutive weekends. My GF is my work horse. I’m so frustrated by this. I don’t want to whine, I want to get accountability and a fix. I know this has been happening for a week for me and everyone else. I only foresee this worsening in coming weeks.

I know I speak for myself only, but I can’t tell you how many new users pop up in our FB group saying they’ve chosen another machine due to the cloud software issue. It is just not worth the hassle of relying on GF’s software, and I completely agree with them.

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I haven’t had it once all week. Maybe an issue with your Internet provider?

(EDIT: And I’m running a 6 hour job – if anything was going to bounce it would have been that!)

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This is the reason I bought a Silhouette over a Cricut machine. I would prefer software I can download onto my computer for sure. It’s only going to get worse as more people buy GFs.

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I’ve never run into the problem either

Sadly the ones that pop in here are specifically popping in here because they’ve run into an issue and this is one of the ways to get support…happy people don’t post in P&S

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I don’t think it’s the internet. I’ve specifically noticed crash times due to being in Hawaii and having a different busy time of the day than everyone on the mainland. It is absolutely the server. ESPECIALLY because the error message says “queue full, too busy.”

They list an issue on the availability page as well. This has been happening to people for a week straight. Is there any eta on local software yet?

I mean, they’re using a Google server, it’s hard to imagine something that’s going to be more stable (https://status.cloud.google.com/)

What exactly do you think they can do to fix this?

They have no intention of making this local - cloud based is a selling point. If you don’t want a cloud based machine there is a hack-your-glowforge group out there that were (the one time I ran into them) working on trying to figure out a local version…

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FROM MY UNDERSTANDING, ONCE THE DESIGN IS PROCESSED ON THEIR SERVER AND SENT OVER TO YOU, IT OPERATES INDEPENDENTLY OF THEIR SERVERS AND NO MATTER HOW LONG THE CUTTING OR ENGRAVING TAKES IT IS ALREADY DOWNLOADED TO YOUR COMPUTER. AM I WRONG IN THIS ASSUMPTION? (Sorry about the caps, I am not yelling I promise)

No outages currently shown.

Yes, you are wrong.

The processed file is not sent to your computer, but to the machine itself - that’s why it needs an internet connection.

Complex designs can be larger than can be stored on the machine,

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Have you tried looking here Status Glowforge?

I’m so glad I made this post because now I’m aware of an availability page. That’s super helpful- thank you.

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… but they have a point in that the size of the file is most likely not the issue here. I can only imagine that a “full queue” wouldn’t even start processing long enough to time out on a too-large file.

That said, I have not seen this queue error.

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That’s interesting info.

And to reply to your question- I have no idea what they can do to fix it. I have only heard talk about making it non-cloud based. Just not having to rely on server, from my perspective, would be ideal. Apparently, according to FB admin, I’m only “griping” and not asking for a solution or even an idea of how long this is expected to be an issue. I can’t deal with the social media admin power trip junk, so I guess I will start searching the forum and seeing what other people are experiencing. I’ve just noticed lots of other people dealing with this this week and I’m sure it’s due to new updates. So that gives me an inkling of hope that it’ll get better in the coming weeks. Hopefully.

Yeah, it’s not gonna be non-cloud based and (I’m guessing) part of why the admin was saying you were just griping is that there isn’t a solution currently available. So saying you want to leverage the “thousands” of people who are having issues, yet what do you want to do with this leverage?

Have you submitted a ticket to the staff? Folks on here who were hitting that seemed to only be getting it off and on, and there was a Google outage during that time. If you’ve been getting it for a week solid that seems like an issue you might want to submit to the staff (which technically you’ve done here by posting in P&S, though your original post doesn’t actually ask a question). You may be having a different issue that’s individual to your machine, part of the joy of the cloud based is it’s easy for them to check the logs on your machine and see exactly what it thought was happening, they might be able to address your individual problem.

Worth a shot eh?

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The whole point of cloud-based is that you can arbitrarily scale your resources up or down at any time. The systems used by Google, AWS, Microsoft and many others are all designed to behave this way. It’s a primary selling point - buy the processing and storage you need now and when you need more you just have to pay for it and it’s yours.

These cloud based systems are already geographically distributed, both for fault tolerance and performance. You don’t want all the cloud requests generated on the East Coast to have to go all the way to Washington or California to be serviced. The way the workloads are distributed is invisible to the end user, so you have no easy way of determining where the work is actually getting done. But trust me, these cloud providers are laser focused on performance and you just can’t perform well in this use case with a single centralized processing and storage resource.

So if GF’s systems are indeed being overwhelmed leading to Queue Full errors, it’s trivially easy to fix.

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Absolutely worth a shot. I think FB is likely providing a smaller microcosm of people experiencing the issue. I appreciate your help! And I had no idea of a google outage- I also didn’t know that is where the server is based, so that’s also helpful. Thanks a lot!

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your “trivially” easy fix have taken Google (not Glowforge) engineers 8 days so far and they’re still not at 100%…

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Not necessarily.

Just because the cloud provider has resources, doesn’t mean every customer has unlimited access.

It could very well be the case that GF customers have used up all allocated (and subscribed) resources, and that is what drives the error.

That’s what I think is happening. The processing of our jobs is not overly complex, similar tasks for 3D printers and CNC machines (for example) take just a few seconds on a reasonably modern computer.

Moving away from cloud to local computer isn’t about complexity, it’s about having to support software on a gazillion different operating system versions and applications.

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She has, since she posted here in Problems and Support.

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