Has NextGen Gallery memory usage increased in 2.0.40?

I had the same issues with NextGen and the new WordPress. I am not sure exactly what it is doing but server memory usage shoots up until the server crashes and restarts. After fiddling with a bunch of plugins I am sure it is NextGEN that is doing it.

Right now it is disabled things are happy. However, I would really like to know what this is happening and how to fix it.

Thanks!

@mev & @iillc – If you would like to submit a Bug Report (https://www.nextgen-gallery.com/report-bug/) with your site specifics we would be happy to look a little deeper into what may be happening on your site.

We will need log in and FTP credentials for the WordPress installation, please include those with the Bug Report, too.

Thanks!

– Cais.

Here is the mixed data I have been able to measure so far:

1. phpinfo() – tells me I have a total of 90M of memory available.

2. I also added “define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’90M’);” to my wp-config.php file so wordpress and phpinfo() are both consistent on the amount of memory used.

3. I used the WP-Memory-Usage to tell me the amount of memory used in my Dashboard. This tells me the following values:
– With NextGen Gallery disabled = 34.57 MB or 38%
– With NextGen Gallery 1.19.13 = 36.37 MB or 40%
– With NextGen Gallery 2.0.40 = 40.95 MB or 46%
so this definitely tells me 2.0.40 is using more memory though none of these amounts should be close to my limits. For example, it seems to suggest that NextGen Gallery 2.0.40 is using triple the memory of 1.9.13.

4. My blog is not particularly large, but following are the counts:
– 192 posts
– 85 comments
– 38 pages
– 766 images
– 13 galleries
– 2 albums
Until I emptied my spam folder, I did have 8861 spam comments though emptying that folder didn’t seem to change things.

5. Potentially un-related but I also have one other memory related message show up on the dashboard. While displaying WordPress News, it gives

Warning: xml_parse() [function.xml-parse]: Memory allocation failed : growing buffer in …/wp-includes/SimplePie/Parser.php on line 154

This appears regardless of which configuration of NextGen gallery I use.

6. At this point reverting back to 1.9.13 addresses at least the symptoms so I’m going to keep my main site running that. I prefer not to give out credentials to this site or have it be a further testbed but if I get some time next weekend I’ll see if I can backup and create a copy that could be examined for testing.

One more follow up. There may be some caching going on in the dashboard widget, since when I moved the “class-simplepie.php” class that loads the news, I didn’t actually get a “No such file or directory” error message. So I think the dashboard is showing me older cached out of memory errors rather than changing depending on whether I install NextGen Gallery or not.

Will wait overnight and see if cache expires as some point here.

@mev – IIRC, the simple pie cache is defaulted to 24 hours (but I could be mistaken there).

Thanks for the update on what you have found and what actions you have taken.

– Cais.

I am still copying over the web site to separate test domain.

However, in process of copying the database one thing very quickly jumps out:
– The text size of my “wp_options” table is 22MB of characters and has autoincremented to 3523730 entries. It is almost entirely filled with entries with the following types of names

* displayed_gallery_rendering_<hash>
* _transient_timeout_<hash>
* displayed_galleries_<hash>
* _transient_<hash>

In fast there are so many of these names that the table will not import in phpmyadmin (at least in one try).

So this leads me to a few questions:
1. What is the purpose of those entries?
2. Do I need all these entries for proper functioning of NextGen Gallery – or can I delete them all before bring in the table?
3. Is there an “options leak” where NextGen gallery is creating space in a MySQL table and never cleaning up?

The hypothesis I am going on now is that NextGen has had some versions that “leaked” all these entries which polluted my wp_options table and consumed a huge amount of memory. I don’t know if this is still in the NextGen code but having a few photos and albums and a web site with a few hits meant this accumulated to point where the trash is polluting the web site. Any thoughts on this or more information?

For what it is worth, changing over SimplePie caused the memory leak to reappear for fetching the WordPress News. However, I need to see if this still occurs if I have a sane sized wp_options table.

Deleting all the
_displayed_gallery_*
_displayed_galleries_*
_transient_timeout_*
_transient_[0-9a-f]*
entries brings my wp_options table to only 529 entries and drops the amount of memory used (with NextGen 1.9.13) to be 27.62 MB or 31%. It also fixes symptoms I observed with SimplePie giving out of memory errors.

I don’t know if 2.0.40 was where this started or whether WordPress 3.8 + 2.0.40 was what finally pushed things over the edge with all this junk inserted earlier in the 2.0.* release. However, will stay with 1.9.13 for now and mark this as resolved.

@mev – Thanks for the update. We will try to make use of your feedback and see if there is anything that we may be able to use from it.

We really appreciate you time in all of this troubleshooting.

– Cais.

I ran a plugin test and found that NextGen accounts for 80% of the memory usage.

Before I do any gallery work, I need to allocate at least another 300-400MB of memory to my machine in order to avoid crashing my server.

This plug is EXTREMELY memory intensive. Is this an anomoly?

RY

@ryansales – Although we do recognize there are resource management improvements that can be made the amounts you are indicating you require is higher than I have ever seen, even with HUGE high count image galleries.

What specifically are you trying to accomplish that you need that much more memory allocated to your “machine”?

– Cais.

My custumer has a website with 7000+ Picuters and 2000+ unique visits per day.
Nextgen gallery 2 leaches ram around 2GB. He makes query in every page with or without galleries. Apparently Quick Cache doesn’t compensate the problem.
Thanks anyway for your work.

@jabawack – This post was 5 months old, it would be much better for you to create a new topic rather than dredge one up that is related to a much older version than the current release.

Also to note, Quick Cache may not be as compatible with NextGEN Gallery as other caching plugins, you might consider W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache as alternatives.

Thanks!

– Cais.