New update kills random picture widget

Hi @sfrueh

Thank you so much for this detail information.
We would like to check one more thing.
Is that ok?

We need to check for existing plugin conflicts.
1.- Temporarily deactivate all your plugins except NextGen Gallery and NextGen Pro (or Plus).
2.- Is the problem solved? Then, it was caused by one of your plugins. Please check one by one and find the one causing the problem.

Please, keep us posted.

-Gaby

Hi Gaby,

I deactivated and re-activated all plugins exept NextGEN Gallery. It had no effect, the problem is still there. So there seems to be no plugin conflict.

If I deactivate and re-activade the widget itself, it has no effect either.

Other observation I made:
If I change the with x height sizes of the widget just for testing, is freezes with ten other pictures – but still freezes and shows the same selection every time.

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Hi @sfrueh-
We’d like to take a closer look at the issue. We may need to temporarily deactivate plugins and switch the theme while troubleshooting. Would you feel OK with that? If so, please send us a bug report here: https://www.imagely.com/report-bug , refer back to this forum thread, and let them know Mihai referred you. ??
Thanks!
Mihai

Hi Mihai,

sorry for the late answer. I’m just filling out the bug report formular.

There is one new observation:
The random pictures seem now to refresh at least once a day.
So the ten frozen pictures seem to be the same for several hours, but others the next morning. So it got at least a little better, but I don’t know what that depends on.

Thank you very much for thrying to help me!

Greetings

PS:
I have no internet from 19. november to 2. december. Sorry if I don’t respond in that days!

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by SFrueh.

Hi!

We have already informed that this particular problem was not a bug, but that the gallery uses a 24 hours cache.
It’s has been solved!

Thanks!

-Gaby

@imagely Thank you for the update regarding caching of images in random image galleries, as I was experiencing the exact same issue.

Is there currently anywhere, or will there somewhere, be an option to adjust this cache reset time? Random image galleries should be random…

@agreda – We can look at adding an option to adjust the cache time frame.

Just for context, we did use to do straight random galleries. But most mechanisms by which you generate a random batch of images are quite performance intensive. This performance hit gets worse if the user has, say, 10000 images on their site and you are querying to get a random batch of 20 out of 10000. And it gets even worse if someone is doing this inside a widget on the sidebar, which means this query is getting run on every single page load of the site.

The performance hit from this kind of functionality can be so strong that some hosts, including WPEngine, actually prevent it entirely.

The caching mechanism dramatically reduces the performance impact of random galleries, but as currently implemented, you’re right it may not seem random in that it doesn’t update every time you see the page.

We did, at one point, have a solution where we would do a random query on each of the first five page loads and then we’d cache each set of image. That gives us five cached sets of randomly selected images to work with, and you can rotate between those without performance implications to give a stronger feel of randomness. You then regenerate those sets every 24 hours. We could try re-implementing something like that. There were a few trade offs with this approach too of course. But we can raise it for team discussion again.

Thank you for the feedback @edanzer

I also appreciate the attention to detail regarding performance, and really like the last idea you reference – caching a daily “set” of random images – to present the appearance of true randomness.

And just for context, we operate a popular community site with users often frequenting the same pages multiple times daily. A couple of our members noted that the “random images” were no longer random. Thanks again for providing an explanation I can relay.

Keep up the good work!

Just wanted to post an update here so you know we haven’t forgotten about this. I mentioned before we were very busy with the Gutenberg / WordPress 5.0 release (just released yesterday).

We have, in the meantime, actually worked on this and implemented a solution. We should be able to release it relatively soon.

Thanks for the update @edanzer. Very much appreciated!
I look forward to the fix. ??

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Arnoud.

@edanzer – Any news on a solution to the 24 hour caching?

FYI: The latest update (v.3.1.5) eliminates caching of random gallery images.

Actually, it does not. I am running 3.1.5 on https://riverrail.org and the random images in the widget are not randomizing – they are the same on every page.

I have even tried doing a forced refresh of the page (CTRL+F5) and I still get the same images.