Well, we were hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but unfortunately we had to reset the movie queue this morning, deleting many requests which were made during the last couple days. The reason for the reset is that our server was overwhelmed with requests, to the point where new requests had estimated wait times in numbers of days, which is unreasonable. We looked into many different options, and tried some (including reducing the size of the movies made), but nothing was able to completely solve our problems: the time it would have taken to completely catch-up would have meant that even if other new exciting solar events were to occur, videos of those events would not be processed until days later!

In the future we will try and take measures to keep this from happening again. The last couple of days have made us look at the services we provide in a whole new way, thanks to the huge interest from you, our users, and we are grateful for that. We are constrained by our resources, so we may not be able to process many more movies each minute any time soon, but what we can do is make it easier for users to find other movies that are out there that have already been made. Thousands of movies have been made by users on Helioviewer.org, but right now there is no simple way to search through those movies and find the ones you are interested in. Further, we will also take some measures to make the users more aware of what the current wait time is before they submit a movie request, and also provide them with an option to cancel the request if they decide they do not want to wait for the movie. All of this will make it easier for you to get to the movies you want.

We apologize to all of the users who have queued movies during the last couple days that did not get processed. If you are still interested in making a movies please go ahead and queue it up again. Hopefully we will not have to take such extreme measures again. Thanks to you all for your patience.