By mrsuther - 10/24/2016
Hello,
I recently placed a picture rating survey on MTurk.
Approximately 35% of those attempting to complete the experiment reported that upon downloading the Inquisit player, the study would never finish loading, and that in some cases their browser crashed.
The experiment involves loading 240 jpeg images with an approximate file size of 90 KB per image.
Has anyone else come across a similar problem, and if so, might know of a solution?
Thanks in advance.
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By Dave - 10/24/2016
Downloading >240 files with a combined size of ~22MB will take some time. Unrelated to the individual or combined size, a large number of files causes a noticeable download performance hit. This can be further exacerbated by other factors, e.g. a somewhat slow or unreliable internet connection. During download, it may seem as if the web player stopped responding / working, whereas in reality it is actually still downloading files in the background and should eventually start. I'm not sure what to make of the mentioned browser crashes -- the web player / web experiments do not actually run "in" the browser and it crashing would not affect the browser.
Things that can be done to improve the situation are:
- Reduce the amount of files involved (if possible).
- Reduce file sizes as much as possible.
- Download the set of files in smaller subsets by using <batch>. This might seem a bit hack-ish, but should actually work well. I've laid out that approach in some detail here: https://www.millisecond.com/forums/FindPost19616.aspx
Hope this helps.
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