[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Unusually High Server Loads

  • I was posting to another thread with a similar topic, but didn’t want to hijack the original author’s post.

    I manage a blog with 20 contributing photographers. We use NextGEN so that each photographer has their own gallery to manage. Also, we use NextGEN to display the image within the post and when the image is clicked it displays at it’s full 900 pixel size using the Thickbox option. The slideshow function is disabled.

    We are having HUGE server load issues. I’ve been working with our hosting company for months trying to resolve this issue. Lately, it’s been so bad that we are at risk of having our site quarantined and banned until it’s resolved. So, I’m working hard to figure out what’s happening.

    I did some tests with a plugin for Firefox called YSLOW and there are a lot of things happening, but it appears that most of the problem areas point to NextGEN. I’ve also narrowed it down to a few other things. At this point, I’m trying to isolate issues until I figure it out.

    We have the blog set up to only show 8 posts at a time. Our design is simple. At most, we get 500 hits in a day. Not a lot and it should be quite nimble. What should I be looking at or tweaking within NextGEN? Am I correct in assuming the larger images are loading in the background? Is there a way to disable that feature so that it only loads the full sized 900 pixel image when the viewer clicks on the image? What am I missing?

    The other things it could be are simply a bad theme. We are using a modified version of the Linquist theme. I’m looking into taking the default WP theme and making one from scratch. My webhost told me that a poorly written theme could gobble up lots of server RAM. I also read an article that stated WP itself is a performance hog.

    As a last resort, if we were to abandon NextGEN altogether, how do we migrate a year’s worth of posts (20 per weeks x 52 weeks) from the NextGEN galleries to a new file structure, more of a traditional structure? I’m assuming that would be a very daunting, hand coding weekend of fun, right?

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
  • Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Here’s a question for you.

    Is there any way to have NextGEN create two images?

    Our theme has one image that displays inline as 500 pixels. When they click on the image, it opens up to the full 900 pixel size with the thickbox display.

    One of the biggest issues we’re noticing is that NextGEN appears to be loading all the full sized images in the background and dynamically resizing them for the index page inline posts.

    Also, Chrome browser shows that the images are being loaded from a NextGEN Gallery Cache folder?

    It seems to be a bottleneck for our site. Am I missing something in the settings or is this just the way NextGEN currently operates?

    Hello,
    For nextgen using server resources; there may be an sql random issue.
    Beyond that you’ll want to ask the developer.
    As a quick cure, do set the default theme for 24 hours to check server load.

    As for migrating nextgen.
    There is a plugin (sorry, can’t think of the name.) which imports from a folder/folders of images and creates an attachment with each image. This attachment is now part of the WP system, and will automatically create all image versions defined in your system. I make plugins which add image versions so as well as sizes: thumbnail, medium, large, original, You may also have: minithumb, slideshow, excerpt.

    There are numerous plugins for migrating images, have a search.
    I could never understand the need for nextgen. But it seams to fulfill a need.

    Either way you go, have a look at superslider-show for a slideshow solution. Works with nextgen and without.

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Daiv,

    Thank you for your response. I set this up over a year ago using NextGEN as it was recommended to me by someone as the perfect solution for my project. I’m kind of married to it at this point. That’s why I’m hoping to find some assistance in this forum.

    Sorry to be dense, but I’m not sure how to set the default theme for 24 hours to check server load. Is that done on the actual server itself or is this a function within WP? Please clarify this for me and explain what this will do?

    Also, i’m not looking for a slideshow option at all. In fact, the only thing I really like about NextGEN for MY project is the fact that each photographer (20 total) has their own gallery to upload into and manage. We have it set to display a scaled down version inline on each post. When the user clicks on the image, it uses the Thickbox option to show the larger 900 pixel image.

    Honestly, I don’t think most people know they can click on the images to make them larger. I’m trying to either figure out a solution using NextGEN or another solution and a solid strategy to migrate over a years worth of posts to another solution.

    All I’m trying to do is speed up our blog. We are set to do some serious advertising and if we increase traffic and more demands on the server, we are going to get banned from our server.

    When you talk about high server load, how can you ( or your hoster ) measure it ? You can normally only creat a huge server load when you use the singlepic feature without the cache option.

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Alex… thanks for taking a look at this issue. My hosting company is Westhost and they have tools on their end to measure server load. We are close to being put on quarantine if we can’t figure this out.

    I had a web developer take a look at our site using tools he has in Chrome and Firefox. It’s honestly hard to figure out what’s going on, but the cache is active for NextGEN and we are using the Singlepic feature. It appears to be serving up all the images from a single cache folder and that is one bottleneck.

    I’m happy to call them and ask if you can think of what I should be looking for. It’s possible that the actual web hosting company is at fault, but I’ve used them for years for my personal business site, a number of other blogs I manage and another site that I use for online shopping cart gallery and database.

    I’m clearly frustrated by all of this. Our photos are not large at all. 900 pixels wide when opened in the SinglePic feature and coming in at 300-400k in size. Our site is simple, not a lot of graphics or other server intensive operations going on…

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Alex…

    I just called Westhost and they said they are checking server load by running a Linux command line code: P.S. AUX

    Given how well developed and well supported this plugin is, I am more and more convinced we may be dealing with a theme specific issue.

    I’ve narrowed it down to these two issues and am trying to figure it out. This is difficult at best. Thanks in advance for any insight and help.

    Randy… Did you get this resolved? I had similar experience with overloading at Westhost on possibly the same plugin. I was experimenting with various image viewers including NextGen.

    Westhost set my MaxClients to very low as soon as they noticed the loading – which slowed my site to a crawl – so I deleted all the image viewer plugins. That resolved their issue, and they claimed to have restored my MaxClients, but my site continues to crawl and is almost unusable if I’m logged on to WP and trying to view pages.

    I’ve been using WP for several years with good results and at the latest version 3.0.1. Would like to use an image viewer again, but tech replies from Westhost is almost non existent, so I’m curious what others have done after encountering load issue… my site needs fixing and it appears up to me to find solution – perhaps a new hosting service.

    Folks, there may be a much easier way to do what you’re trying to do. Check out https://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/item/css-popup-image-viewer/ to see what I mean.
    I’m using this CSS for all kinds of pop-ups, as you can see in two of my blogs:
    On this page I have text that mouses-over into a large image. You can use a thumbnail image instead of text.
    And on this page, I use the same CSS for text pop-ups as well.
    Very clean. Haven’t had issues with overload.

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    I never did resolve the issue with Westhost or NextGEN. I’d be happy to pay for tech support. Part of the irony of free software, right? ??

    Westhost threatened to quarantine our site if we did not resolve our issue within 48 hours, so I had to move forward without finding any answers.

    I purchased a new WP theme ($300-figured it would come with decent tech support) and reconfigured how we use NextGEN.

    Since we have 20 photographers using the site every day and two years of content to update if we ditched NextGEN, it was a daunting task. I changed our theme to display the images at their full size of 900 pixels, inline. This eliminated the need for NextGEN to create thumbnails or smaller versions that were shown at full resolution when clicked on.

    Once I did that (installed and customized the new theme) and changed NextGEN, it seems to be working perfectly now. Our site was moved out of quarantine and most of our speed issues have disappeared.

    NextGEN is great for this type of project because each photographer can manage their own personal gallery, instead of dumping all the images that are uploaded every day to the default WP-Content folder location.

    Whether our issue was related to NextGEN or our theme will remain a mystery. I just got tired of talking to myself and not being able to find any help. Sometimes these forums are an amazing resource and other times it feels like I get more done by physically banging my head against my desk. ??

    Hopefully, this will help someone else…

    I’m not sure if I get the point. You changed the theme to a different size and then the server reduced ? If you say “NGG didn’t need to resize the image”, what do you changed on NGG side ?

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Alex, I’m not sure I understand your post. There were basically two things we did to address this problem. One was to purchase and install a new theme. This helped. However, the other issue was with NGG.

    With our previous theme, the photographers uploaded images that were 900 x 600 pixels. Our theme used smaller version inline, around 580 pixels. If they clicked on the image, NGG would lightbox the full sized 900 pixel image.

    With the new theme, we decided to make the inline images 900 pixels, so NGG is no longer handling the resize, either as cache or on the fly. This seems to have dramatically reduced our server CPU.

    NGG is wonderful for allowing each of our 20 authors the ability to manage their own image galleries. For that purpose it’s truly unique and a great tool. However, I wish there were a lite version available that didn’t have all the other features and code bloat. A lean, mean image gallery database plugin for WP.

    NGG is the best option available for the all around professional gallery management tool.

    Have you tried using the Shutter effect instead of Thickbox yet? It may load less code for instance (I’m not sure cause I haven’t checked that out). If you do decide to try out Shutter, you will want to get the Shutter Reloaded plugin so they can work in tandem.

    I know it is professional photography, so there is a minimum level of quality, and that is usually a high level. I am wondering if you could optimize the images anymore than they are (Irfanview.com has an extremely efficient batch image processing system for that)

    I don’t know anything about your site, but I can’t imagine a 900 pixel photograph taking up more than a few hundred kilobytes if it is at optimized size values, under 1mb at very high quality.

    o.k. after posting this, I read that you seem to have resolved your problems, but I’ll leave this post up anyways.

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    I appreciate the ideas Rain. We do optimize our images for the site. Exporting them from Photoshop using Save for Web and setting the quality to around Level 80 for high quality, they are coming in way under 170KB.

    right, seems like your hitting all the ‘first check’ spots then.

    I see you were talking about some of the cache plugins in that other thread that this one spawned off of.

    In my moderate testing of various caching plugins, for a gallery type site, they have consistently caused more problems than solved with regards to speed.

    The only time I’ve noticed much speed increase amongst all these “caching junkies” is when they use a CDN. I’m fairly convinced that having a CDN may be the bottom line in seeing any serious improvement in performance. Perhaps consider investing in a CDN account to host your images (I’m sure you’ve looked into it, I’m just saying you may want to go a step further).

    Thread Starter randykepple

    (@randykepple)

    Rain… GREAT thoughts! We did end up ditching the cache plugins. I agree with you that they cause more problems than they solve. The idea is sound, but the implementation is problematic at best in most cases.

    CDN is an interesting idea, but honestly. It’s a simple WordPress blog. ??

    I think NGG is really great, but wish they had the lite version. Small footprint, robust and minimal code, maximum functionality without all the bells and whistles.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
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