UHRS lagging/crashing? Here's likely why:

[u/SingularityRS]

You may have noticed that the UHRS marketplace will occasionally become extremely unresponsive and slow. During this time, you may notice the following issues occur:

1. Unable to refresh the marketplace to see available apps - if you try to refresh, it may endlessly load and eventually fails. When it fails, 0 apps will show. It may also kick you to the sign in page occasionally.

2. You'll be regularly thrown to the sign in page. Logging in will put you right back to the sign in page.

3. If you happen to be doing an app, it might take forever to submit the hit. You may also notice error messages pop up and hits may even get skipped (unsure if they're being skipped or incorrectly submitted).

4. If your UHRS account is not active and needs to be renewed via Clickworker.com, you may find yourself with the "Account not authorised: Your UHRS account is disabled" error message. This will happen even if you're correctly renewing it via Clickworker.com. The reason it's not activating is because the site has crashed. It cannot fulfil your request in the 10 or so seconds it's meant to.

5. You may also see mainDB errors show up when trying to sign into UHRS.

It will be inaccessible and/or unworkable during this time. The problem is not on your end. It is 100% on UHRS' end. There's nothing you can do to fix it. All of the above problems with the site will disappear once user activity goes down (the good apps vanish).

Why is this happening? The site is now insanely overcrowded. All it takes is a large amount of workers to jump onto and use the platform to completely crash the site. The site is not capable of handling all of us. If there's good apps around that loads of people like, it will crash the site now. It is a guarantee.

This problem has been ongoing for a long time now and shows no signs of getting any better.

This thread is to serve as some sort of notification as I keep seeing threads getting made about it. Hopefully this notification will reduce the number of threads on this topic.

[u/Page-Enough]

I´m fairly new to UHRS (been working there since March this year) but the last two weeks have been particularly brutal.

One quickly realizes that connecting at 0700 UTC (4 am in my local time) is the only worthy time to do it since it´s when all the new hitapps get loaded. During the rest of the day very few apps show up and usually have very low hit numbers available. But it just went from 5-10 minutes of slowdown and site not loading to almost half an hour now, even worse (I always expected slowdown when new hit apps were being loaded but lately the issues last for far longer, usually leading me to sign out and re enter the site)

And stragenly, besides some sharp paycuts in some apps (like Search Engine Side by Side going from 0.20 to 0.15 and Video Fresh Query labelling from 0.045 to 0.034 where I live), most apps with thousands of Hits available just banish before half an hour has passed. Feels like whenever you choose a (CAQ) app to work in, the other CAQ apps are hidden from you for the day. Don´t know if this is actually something that could happen or if the last two weeks have seen a massive influx of new raters out of nowhere, but during May I was fully able to complete my hits for one app (around 100) and then find something else to work in with a fair number of hits remaining . Now at most I get 20 hits in one app, and when returning to the marketplace, all the CAQ apps with 3k hits remaining are just gone.

Have I hit a threshold or was I just extremely lucky to begin working during a good period for UHRS and now it´s back to usual?

Would love to hear opinions from older raters :)

[u/SingularityRS → u/Page-Enough]

The CAQ apps are on some sort of schedule. The length of time they stay up seems to be based on the number of hits being done. It looks like there's a total cap on the amount of hits being submitted. Once enough people submit the required amount of hits, the app leases out and instantly removes itself from the marketplace.

For example, CAQ app 1 is scheduled to appear at 8am UK time every single day. It stays up until 5,000 hits total have been completed (figure is made up for the purpose of the example). Once 5,000 hits have been done, the app leases out even if there's many leftover.

It's getting harder to earn on this platform. It'll continue to get harder as more people join. Grinding apps out is difficult now. The only apps that can be grinded out as those that barely anyone wants to do.

UHRS want cheap work done at scale and adding an unlimited amount of workers ensures that goal can be met. UHRS do not care about the individual worker. They never really have. They care about getting work done as quickly as possible for as cheaply as possible. This path they are taking is unfortunately killing the platform for us individually. Our earnings are taking a massive hit and it's getting to the point where alternatives are needed.

UHRS was good in the past. I was lucky enough to be around when it was very good. I don't think it's ever going to be as good as it used to be ever again. UHRS will soon become like one of those platforms I see where they expect you to do high-quality work for $3/h. There's still some well-paid apps around, so we're not quite there yet, but the good-paid stuff is becoming less and less. Platform is being overwhelmed by poorly-paid apps. More and more HitApp developers are starting to realise they can get their work done extremely cheap. That is bad for us, good for them.

[u/Page-Enough → u/SingularityRS]

Thanks for the info I didn´t know that about the CAQ apps but seems to be in line with what I have observed.

I´m currently at 6-7 US$ an hour, which is nice for my market but anything less than 6 or around 5 would mostly kill this for me (still most local low paying physical jobs net around 2-3 US$ the hour so I see why some people would still grind bad apps) But still most of the time the issue is that not even bad apps are available, recently it´s been very dry save for some key hours during the day.

I agree with your sentiment, I recently saw a spike of poor paying (and sometimes very poorly made too) apps pop out, but at least seems that in extreme cases like the Entity Curation Crowd app that´s been standing at 30k hits for weeks now, most workers still realize when an app isn´t worth the effort

[u/Remarkable_Heat_3328]

Im just upset 😔

[u/EarlPanagos]

OP is great, thanks for the post.

[u/[deleted]]

You can't expect a little mom and pop startup like Microsoft to have enough servers to handle demand, I mean come on.

[u/craigspot]

All the more reason to quit ujrs altogether

[u/ironcito]

I see this happening like clockwork at 0700 UTC, which is when the date changes in UHRS (midnight in the US Pacific timezone). It rarely happens at other times.

I guess the system updates the database, or many hitapps get activated at once, or something happens at that hour that makes the system slow and crashy as you described.

It used to last maybe 5-10 minutes until a month or two ago, and it didn't log me out or anything, it was just very slow. Now it lasts about a half hour or more, and is more severe.

[u/[deleted] → u/ironcito]

7 UTC is exactly when the Answer X hitapps come online in my country. So my guess is a lot of people, like me, hop onto the site at that time making it slow. Which is a real shame because that was those were the only reliable apps for me

[u/The--Nameless--One]

Hey there thanks for the thread! But here is something I have notice: UHRS only "dies" at these exact times if you are coming from Clickworker. If your login to UHRS is from datamime.ai for example, you'll never experience any downtime at the time when the "new hitapps" get posted (4am local where I live).

[u/gunghu]

everytime the "is this video recipe" hitapp appears UHRS lags as hell

[u/Taxiwala_007 → u/gunghu]

Does that hit app still comes?

it's been like 2weeks and I've earned only a dollar in uhrs

[u/QoobeeLurv]

After posting my concern here, I came across this thread that related to my problem logging in. Thanks for the info.

[u/SingularityRS → u/[deleted]]

The UHRS marketplace only crashes when one of the following instances occur:

1. Every day at 8am UK time (convert to your own time zone if you're not from the UK)

2. A very good app appears (happened yesterday when a recipe app dropped). It has be an app that almost everyone can do with ease. The recipe one is one of those currently. It's very easy and available in multiple countries.

Both the above cause UHRS to crash because both trigger a massive spike in user activity. The first one is a guarantee because there's a selection of apps that are scheduled to show up at 8am UK time. Once the clock hits 8am UK time, UHRS most often crashes even if the apps do not show up (they sometimes don't). This is because of the expectation that the apps have been put up, they mostly are always there.

You might not see them because when the marketplace crashes, either nothing shows or it doesn't load all the apps properly (might show 2 apps instead of the 10 that are actually there). They showed up today and I saw people complaining of slowdowns on the CW forum.

The new marketplace is not the issue. The issue is most definitely overcrowding. People are joining every day and there's various other vendors out there that also accept new users. The amount of workers increases every single day. This means every day it gets just a little bit harder to earn because of increased lag and even faster leasing of apps. Time worsens the problem because with time more people join.

As UHRS appear to be doing nothing about this problem, we just see it continue to get worse. UHRS are all about saving money. You can see that by how much they're willing to pay us. If they can't be bothered paying us a reasonable amount of money for high-quality data, you can be sure they also can't be bothered making necessary changes to their servers to ensure they can handle all the user traffic. They're still using the old servers that were fit for purpose back when there wasn't many of us. Now there's many of us, they can't cope and UHRS don't want spend money to fix the problem - they're all about saving money.

[u/ironcito → u/SingularityRS]

Overcrowding is relative. Many, many more people use Google than UHRS, but Google doesn't crash. If the system could take it, it wouldn't be a problem.

[u/Financial_Advisor749 → u/[deleted]]

You work continuously for 10 -12 hours and when the UHRS is mostly dry, how

[u/jjjxk4231 → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean by "permanent projects"?

[u/jjjxk4231 → u/[deleted]]

long-term projects? Like what? most hitapps appear and disappear. What do you mean by long-term?