Slow servers for Pro machines? Ridiculous

@OgreWagon Here’s the timeline:

  • March through September: You use your Glowforge, which talks to the same servers as every other Glowforge.
  • October: Glowforge Premium Beta begins, introducing the “Fast Lane” feature that speeds up processing of a design after you hit the print button. Your files continue to be opened/rendered by the same servers as always. After you hit “print”, they’re now sent to the “fast lane” pool for processing.

  • Some time in November/December: Your free trial of Glowforge Premium ends. Your files continue to be opened/rendered by the same servers as always. Your Glowforge resumes sending designs for processing to the servers it talked to from March to September. They are no slower than before. People that choose to upgrade have their designs processed by the “fast lane” pool instead.

That last part is the only place where things diverged, and only for that one feature. You said you noticed a night and day difference in opening designs. Your designs have been “opened” by the same servers at all times you’ve owned your Glowforge, from March until today.

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Objectively false, for the reason everyone else has been trying to explain.

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Since this whole “faster servers never existed” argument keeps popping up in these conversations. Everyone needs to take a step back and understand neither Glowforge nor @dan ever told us the size of the compute nodes they use on GCP prior to having the fast/slow model or after.

Take the following three examples, each entirely possible, and to simplify things only use 4 tiers each being faster then the previous:

The Perfect World

old - everyone is on Tier 2
new - slow is Tier 3 and fast is Tier 4

The Likely World

old - everyone is on Tier 2
new - slow is Tier 2 and fast is Tier 3

The Worst Case World

old - everyone is on Tier 2
new - slow is Tier 1 and fast is Tier 3

Regardless, everyone arguing really has no idea what they are talking because we aren’t informed about this stuff and have to go by the press releases.

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@icirellik This argument is moot since the supposed speed change was observed in opening files, not processing them, and the tiers you’re referring to are for the processing server pool. We do not need to know any details about the instance classes used in the processing pools to quash a theory that opening files was slowed down to convince him to get a subscription that doesn’t even purport to speed that up.

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Thanks for the moot response.

edit:

We also don’t know the flow for opening a file. It could very easily be related to server side changes. GlowForge is very secretive about basic functionality.

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The free trial of Premium started in April 2020 - though it looks like “fast lane” started in October (after they upgraded all the servers).

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It is more perfect than that.

Actually, there have been speed improvements from the start, at least five or six I can think of. The biggest improvement was the math for when it was not at top speed it would cut deeper and any hard angle burned all the way through as the laser had to stop and change direction. Those of us who were here from the rollout have seen a steady improvement in big and little jumps all this time, now those improvements have two tracks, one for everyone that is about using the laser, like that corner improvement, and others will be about using the GFUI to create and modify files, like the widget that can make an outline cut from just uploading a raster image.

Improvements will be made in both areas and I do not know what they will be but both regular use and Premium will be a lot better a year from now, just as they are from a year and two years ago. I actually have premium and the "speed improvement is so slight I cannot recognize it, but the change from what it was two years ago when any job that took over an hour would crash first is easy to recognize.

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Hi @OgreWagon! Thanks for being a Glowforge owner. I’m sorry you’ve had slow uploads! Hopefully some of the tips below can help; those are the most likely culprits.

I was going to offer information on Premium, but the community here beat me to it. I highlighted some of the points below to confirm them as correct.

@icirellik: your “perfect world” example is correct. Glowforge Print is significantly faster than the servers we were using in 2019; we upgraded the free servers for everyone before adding the additional option for “fast lane” servers. (I don’t recall the date of the switch)

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