Profile image uploads fail for people on slow or unreliable networks

[blarghmatey]

When we launched Micromasters into production we started seeing errors that were tracked to people trying to upload their profile images. This was preventing users from completing their profiles and registering on the portal. After further investigation it was determined that the reason for the failures was slow or unreliable network connections. Technical details of our findings can be found in the comments for issue #1971

To resolve the immediate problem of users not being able to register we removed the profile image requirement while we pursued other solutions. The first solution that we attempted was to change the image format that was submitted to reduce the image size ( #1972 ). We also set a limit on the size of the submitted image ( #2004 ). The solution that addressed the majority of the failures was to increase the socket timeout in uWSGI ( #2010 ) with more details in #1971

For a more permanent and compliant solution we are working on adding Nginx as a proxy layer to handle the image uploads. The preliminary results are more reliable and standards compliant than the long socket timeout ( #2063 ).