Very often to get an error when using ImageService to convert image

Hello @issacchua

Thank you for reaching out and I am happy to assist you with this.
All images converted with the Image Service tool are sent to a third-party server maintained by the W3 Total Cache team which reduces resource consumption and allows for a large number of conversions in environments where resources can be limited such as shared hosting. Images sent to the W3TC server for conversion are only held temporarily and no permanent information is kept on the server regarding the images.
On some occasions, the server may be overloaded with the requests for conversion and in this case, you may get the “Failed to retrieve a response”.
As you mentioned, the image conversion goes through after a time, so you should repeat the process. Again also note that Pro users have the advantage as the images are converted first for Pro users.
We are working on increasing the capacity of the server for conversion so that the conversion can go smoothly without any hiccups. As this is a fairly new feature, I would like to thank you for your patience and apologies for any delays or inconvenience.
I hope this answers your question.

Thanks!

Hi Marko,

Thanks for your reply. It is quite frustrating that the images failed to get a response from the server resulting in the server cannot handle the request at that time. In a even worse case, the new file is uploaded which is supposed to convert automatically, but because the server failed to respond, the image does not get to convert.

In order to make the process a little bit smoother, here is what I would suggest:
When the conversion is triggered, in spite of of waiting to get response back from the server, we can mark the status to be Processing right away. Since we are relying on the scheduled cron job to download the converted images from W3 server, we can apply the same idea here too. We use cron job to send requests to W3 server, even if the request is failing due to server overloading, the cron job will resend the request once again till the server is responding with something that the code is familiar with, to be it an error or success message.

This whole image-convert process can run in the background without too much user interference. Pro users have higer priorities where their images are converted instantly (or in the top of the queue), regular users can have their images converted when the server is not so busy and that’s fine, as long as the image gets converted eventually.

What do you think? ??

Hello @issacchua

Thank you for your suggestion.
We are always working on improving the plugin and features of the plugin. I’ll bring this to the team and we’ll take your suggestion onto consideration for sure.
Thank you once again!