Several things have conspired to clog the queue for uploading photos and slow it down to a near crawl. These are only affecting uploads; the rest of the site is functioning as normal:

• Two major holidays occurred during which there was much picture-taking

• Everybody’s account limits reset at the first of the month

• Because of the long queue, people’s photos aren’t appearing for sometimes up to a half an hour, and so they reupload them, which slows down the queue even more, and so on

• A major world disaster struck, and hundreds of thousands of visitors converged on Flickr
to view and upload photos of the tragedy in Southeast Asia

• Because of the holidays, there is only a skeleton crew of available Flickr staff to write code to speed up the upload process

• We’re still in beta, which means we are still in active development

As a result, image uploading is very slow. You can help us out by cutting down your uploads for the next two or three days, by uploading photos only once, and waiting an hour to make sure they didn’t upload, by being aware that this is a temporary thing and that we are working on it, and by being patient with us! We thank you for all those things!

We’re feeling a little like this right now:

This is one of my favorite photos. Thanks for this one Jessamyn!

Some interesting statistics:

• The number of images uploaded has tripled over the past two days, January 1 and 2

• Normally we serve about 15 million photos a day, now were serving about 30 million

• About 20 images are uploaded very second; when an image is uploaded, processing it takes a few seconds, because 5 images in different sizes are made, and because we keep live backups on site, each image is each saved onto two different servers