Uploading gif as main image causes error

[msaint]

When trying to upload a gif file, the upload fails and the website errors out

[msaint]

Just successfully uploaded a gif...intermittent issue?

[christianrjo]

Everything seems to be working fine.

[liuhenry]

Some more clarification around this issue: the root cause of this bug is #123

The issue generally only shows up on production, because it has to do with the process timing out when trying to upload an image. On Heroku in particular, web dynos have an absolute timeout of 30 seconds, which can't be adjusted by the end user (you can add a lower limit in your own app to allow for graceful shutdown, since Heroku will simply kill the process, but you can't increase the 30s limit).

When uploading large images, the combined time of imagemagick and the paperclip upload to S3 usually goes over the 30s limit, and you also tend to see a high error rate with gifs due to the increased processing time from imagemagick.

The solution to the issue would be to implement a worker system to handle file uploads, or to do some form of client-side processing and direct upload to S3 (bypassing our servers), but it was not included in the original app due to cost/complexity concerns

I'm closing this issue since we have a separate issue open for it, and we can continue to discuss at We originally decided to hold off on adding these additional dependencies due to cost and complexity, but we can discuss further at #123