Hi,

We've recently launched our new Gallery and it looks great and on the front end for the users it works pretty quick and loads nicely.

However our probelm is that the backend is becoming almost unusable with huge load times on the the admin and album and upload tabs. And getting timeouts such as this MqSql Server has gone away messages.

I'm running on a Quad Core Linux Server with 8 GB of RAM

Here are some of our settings.

Zenphoto version 1.4.0.3 [6817] (Official Build)
Current locale setting: en_US.UTF8
Current gallery theme: Default
PHP version: 5.2.16
Graphics support: PHP GD library bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
PHP memory limit: 128M (Note: Your server might allocate less!)
MySQL version: 5.0.91
Database name: spoilertimages
Table prefix: zp
Spam filter: none
CAPTCHA generator: zenphoto
9 active plugins:
16 active filters:

13655 Images
1157 Albums (2 not published)
0 Comments

Does anyone have any tips/hints about how to improve performance. Are there any plugins I could disable etc that would help. Any php.ini settings that would improve the backend performance for our Gallery Admin staff?

Things that come to mind quickly:

1. set all albums to a fixed album thumb. With that many images it saves you from going through all to find the latest or else.

2. disable the visual thumb selector option.

3. don't upload images bigger than you need for web display (Dimensions, NOT file size). If you need full size images for download maybe better store them separatly.

4. disable the tree view on the backend for hte albums so you only get one level at a time and organize your albums properly in subalbums structure. Zenphoto is generally file system based thus the ease of ftp uploading.

Beside that, I am not sure that any php.ini setting might solve it. You could however try to raise the php memory limit a little more (the more memory the better as always).

PRobably my collegue Sbillard will have some more idea later today.

Thanks as always for your fast response.

I'll start doing some of those now.

Really appreciate your help.

Do also check to see how much memory the server is allocating to the PHP scripts. Unfortunately the PHP memory setting is just "advisory" in that the server may allocate whatever it sees fit, even if less than the setting.

Also in general you sould disable any plugins that you do not need. There is always overhead in loading plugins. But this is more a "front end" consideration.

If your problems are limited to the albums tab then acrylian's suggestions should be sufficient. But if some other tabs are causing problems there is probably something else wrong. You should check the script time limits set on your server. Perhaps they are too short.

Thanks very much, I'll go through all the plugins and see which ones we're not using and see what else we can tweak.

I'll also check the php memory settings.