Certain GIFs fail to upload

Glimbo · Mar 3, 2025

GIFs with a combination of large dimensions and many frames will fail to upload, even if it is under 2MB.
I was trying to upload a GIF banner that was 745.5 KiB [763,429 bytes], 239 frames, 1536x1344.
This always fails whether it's uploaded as a banner, post, or attachment.

I also tried different sizes.
The largest size (listed above) failed to upload with no error given.
A reduced size (198.6 KiB [203,406 bytes], 239 frames, 512x448) gave a generic "an error has occurred" message.
An altered version (120.0 KiB [122,892 bytes], 134 frames, 1280x300) gave either a server timeout error or an error saying to check the browsers console and took about 4 tries before working.
The original smallest GIF is 86.7 KiB [88,737 bytes], 239 frames, 256x244 and this uploads no problem.

All 4 GIF sizes attached in the zip.
I eventually settled for a still image though.

Spike · Mar 4, 2025

Yes I see the errors on my side, I changed some config, can you try again see if there's any difference?

Glimbo · Mar 4, 2025

I tried the largest and reduced ones. Still getting errors. The large one throws an error now though instead of nothing.
"Oops! We ran into some problems. Please try again later. More error details may be in the browser console."

Here's the console log.

Code:

Error: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>503 Service Unavailable</title>
<style>
    body {margin: 20px; font-family: helvetica, sans-serif; max-width: 800px;}
    .error {color: #e00;}
    pre {font-size: 16px;}
    h1 {font-size: 28px;}
</style>
</head><body>
<h1>Service Unavailable</h1>
<p>PHP did not respond properly to the request.
As a result, Apache considers the PHP-FPM service to be unavailable.</p>

<p class=error><b>Detailed information about this error is available in the app's Apache error log at:</b></p>
<pre class=error>/srv/users/SYSUSER/log/APPNAME/APPNAME_apache.error.log</pre>
<p><b>The root cause of this error is often slow PHP code.
You should disable any plugins the app is using and
check the app's PHP error log and PHP slow request log located at:</b></p>
<pre>/srv/users/SYSUSER/log/APPNAME/APPNAME_phpX.Y.error.log
/srv/users/SYSUSER/log/APPNAME/APPNAME_phpX.Y.slow.log</pre>
</body></html>

AnonymousCookieMonster · Mar 4, 2025

off hand, have you run it through gifsicle? Gifsicle can optimize gifs, but there's an interesting option called --careful which comments about making sure the gif header and format is proper to keep compatibility, which otherwise it would drop things to make them smaller and more forgiving programs will still render the gifs correctly.

edit: ran them through gifsicle, a little smaller. But see if that doesn't help.

Post automatically merged: Mar 4, 2025

Well the large didn't upload, but the Altered did... Currently as my banner, i'll leave for a day or so...

One possible solution is when changing the image to default to the 0x0 concordance, then when you reload to change it you can adjust the view... At least for larger ones.

Glimbo · Mar 4, 2025

Still throws errors. Thanks for trying though.
To note, all GIFs I edit are in GIMP and they work fine. It's just when the dimensions are large with many frames.
It might have to do with the server timeout length.

AnonymousCookieMonster · Mar 4, 2025

Could be. I wish you could upload it and set it as two separate steps, that would deal with the problem (probably...)

Actually for retro stuff, having it at 1:1 scale and then having a scale option that's just a zoom-in without the fuzzy bicubic effect, could let those types of headers work well.... As the 180k original would look really good.

That or they get support for webm to work... Spike said he was looking into it.

Spike · Mar 4, 2025

The solution is not increasing timeout which is at 180 seconds now.
It's that it shouldn't take this long to begin with. I don't know why it's so slow to handle gifs.

Glimbo · Mar 4, 2025

Is this related to the issue?

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/uploading-animated-gif.136649/post-1189144

Though really the thing to remember with GIFs is that to resize them, Image Magick and XF has to resize each frame four times. This is a large file with lots of frames so you run the risk of hitting memory and/or execution time limits.

Spike · Mar 10, 2025

Glimbo said:
Is this related to the issue?

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/uploading-animated-gif.136649/post-1189144

I'm not sure xd

Try the gif named altered as banner again please.
The others won't work.

Glimbo · Mar 10, 2025

It worked first try no problem. I'm going to try to increase the area a little and see what happens.

EDIT: Can't seem to get anything bigger than that to work unfortunately.

AnonymousCookieMonster · Mar 10, 2025

Tried the large/reduced and even with lower optimizations. I couldn't get the banners to work either.

Glimbo · Mar 10, 2025

Glimbo said:
It worked first try no problem. I'm going to try to increase the area a little and see what happens.

EDIT: Can't seem to get anything bigger than that to work unfortunately.

I was able to get a bigger area (about 500px high) by converting it to webp but banners don't like animated webp apparently. Or at least the one I'm using. The animation gets cut off.

AnonymousCookieMonster · Mar 10, 2025

webp is suppose to be a single image, to do multiple images you do webm. I'm not sure if you can get away with making a webm and then renaming it to webp, might be something to try. (WebP is part of WebM, being VP7 i believe).

Though i'm sure it would just say it's unsupported, or maybe just look at the first image and ignore the remainder.

edit: "Must be a valid image". Yep that won't work. Too bad.

Spike · Mar 10, 2025

Glimbo said:
I was able to get a bigger area (about 500px high) by converting it to webp but banners don't like animated webp apparently. Or at least the one I'm using. The animation gets cut off.

The forums probably see a webp and dismiss everything after the first frame.
Our animated avatar frames are all .png and are still animated, However when I upload them I had to use FTP cos when I upload an animated png with Xenforo it only processes the first frame.

So, you'll have to stick with gif, and the issue is most likely the number of frames, try less frames.
The altered gif worked well, why not use it?

Glimbo · Mar 10, 2025

Spike said:
The forums probably see a webp and dismiss everything after the first frame.
Our animated avatar frames are all .png and are still animated, However when I upload them I had to use FTP cos when I upload an animated png with Xenforo it only processes the first frame.

So, you'll have to stick with gif, and the issue is most likely the number of frames, try less frames.
The altered gif worked well, why not use it?

The altered one wasn't tall enough even if 300px is the recommended minimum.

On the profile page, the top and bottom get cut off by about 25px when my browser is at the window size I use because xenforo resizes the banner according to browser width.

300px also makes the banner when you hover over my name or avatar blurry. I'd say around 600px is a good minimum.

Certain GIFs fail to upload

Final Form

Attachments

Spike's iconSpike

So have a nice day

Final Form

[]

Attachments

Final Form

[]

Spike's iconSpike

So have a nice day

Final Form

Spike's iconSpike

So have a nice day

Final Form

[]

Final Form

[]

Spike's iconSpike

So have a nice day

Final Form

Users who are viewing this thread

Connect with us

Support this Site

Featured Video

Latest Threads

Online statistics

Forum statistics

Advertisers

Spike

Spike

Spike

Spike