Painfully Slow Multiple Image Uploads

What web hosting are you using ?

Hi Adam.

lowdot.us

Deluxe wordpress plan.

Anyone?

First of all, your thirtyfivemill site is ridiculously heavy at 14.5 megs. And all of that weight are your images. You need to reduce the file size of your images before uploading, and use jpgs instead of pngs. Right now, that can be a 30 second page download for some people. Images really only need to be 72DPI for display. And if you want retina ready images for high res displays, you need a retina ready theme.

And that’s why multiple uploads time out: the server is choking on your images while it tries to process them and the different sizes WordPress generates for use on the site.

…never caused any upload problems previously and doesn’t on my third site which is not wordpress based.

This doesn’t mean anything, because with FTP (or whatever method your’e using outside of WordPress) you’re not trying to upload huge, multiple images and having WordPress generate thumbnails and other sizes for the site.

If you don’t want your WordPress theme – nishita – to generate different sizes of images, you can disable that, but that will also not allow you to use galleries of thumbnails that link to full size images.

SDT, I appreciate your help but that doesn’t entirely make sense. 14.5 megs is not heavy for a photography blog or site. The images are normally uploaded at around 500kb so these are not huge images. I have friends who upload full res images without problems. The media space I have available for storage and upload is what, 3 gigs if I was still on wordpress.com? There wouldn’t be a whole lot of point in having 3 gigs of space if wordpress choked at 14.5 megs.

Before moving to stand-alone this blog was hosted at wordpress.com. At that point there was zero problems with uploads, multiple or otherwise. The problem only accurred after the move, so I’ve a feeling that may be related.

At the same time I installed zenphoto to the blog. That’s the similarity between the two blogs that are causing problems: the other has zenphoto installed too. There were some documented problems with zenphoto and media upoloads and although I thought I’d gone through the steps to fix those, I’m wondering if there still might be a bit of code that’s not co-operating.

Again, I appreciate your help but if 14.5 megs or images of 500kb were a problem to wordpress then I don’t know too many photographers who would even consider using it.

The problem only occurred after the move, so I’ve a feeling that may be related.

Yes; that means it’s your new web host.

Before moving to stand-alone this blog was hosted at wordpress.com. At that point there was zero problems with uploads, multiple or otherwise

That’s because .com has zero limits on CPU for processing images and upload/download bandwidth. Your new host has limits on CPU or upload bandwidth, i.e., the timeouts when uploading multiple, large images

There wouldn’t be a whole lot of point in having 3 gigs of space if wordpress choked at 14.5 megs.

You’re confusing page download bandwidth with host disk storage; there is no relation between those two for this upload timeout issue, nor do they have anything do to with upload timeouts. You probably have even more disk space with the host now; you may or may not have transfer/bandwidth limits.

You’re entirely free to have a heavy site; most of your images are 500-700K; woods1.png is 1.5 megs. Also, the theme is not correctly resizing images; it’s using full size images and scaling them down for the front page, rather than using a correctly scaled image to begin with. That would save a lot of page weight. For the end user, you can also reduce the number of images on the front page for people who do not have 2-3 meg/second internet connections, but that’s your choice.

But the upload timeouts are a host problem; ask them.

OK, thanks again. So you don’t think zenphoto has anything to do with it?

Well, I’ve spoken to the hosting and they say the only limit is a 68mb file size limit. They’ve checked the server and there’s nothing there that could cause such a problem so I’m back to square one.

It’s strange because I’ve found several references to the same problem around the net but no threads that actually gave a solution?

No, it’s still your host. They need to check upload timeouts. What kind of hosting? Shared or VPS? Or set them yourself if you have access to a php.ini file.

max_execution_time = 240
max_input_time = 240

OK, SDT (I’m so glad those last two letters are in that order :-)) you were absolutely correct and when I added the execution line to the php.ini (which wasn’t present) and edited the two values it all now seems to be working as it should.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your patient help, it’s really most appreciated.

Thanks again!