[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Nextgen not made for high traffic blogs? VERY high load

I always did my best to keep database queries low, but I never tested the plugin on such a high traffic…

Are you able to determine what increase the load ?
Have you munin running ? (Munin help me a lot in the past to analyse my own troubles https://alexrabe.de/2009/09/27/traffic-memory-wp-super-cache/

Heres a screenshot from the servers load (after installing the plugin, stats from the last 2 hours): https://i49.tinypic.com/o54xt0.jpg

before i installed this plugin the CPU was on between 100-150, the Average load was on 8-10

im using this dedicated server: https://www.clustered.net/dedicated/

i dont mind that the plugin is using more of the server, but the average load is almost killing the server, the site got A LOT slower after i installed the plugin.

the thing is that i havent announced the new wallpaper section yet so the load will go up even more if i write on the main blog about the new galler. (note that i do not have any problem with the default wordpress gallery)

Default wordpress layout: https://dailymobile.se/2008/12/15/nokia-5800-wallpapers-640×360-mobile-wallpapers-gallery-7/

with nextgen gallery: https://dailymobile.se/2010/01/01/nokia-5800-n97-x6-satio-i8910hd-5530-wallpapers/

My wallpaper page: https://dailymobile.se/wallpapers/ (only the Nokia 5800 wallpaper gallery is using the nexgen gallery)

No im not using munin (your link didnt work). I do have the hyper cache plugin installed (cache set to 1 day, so it deleted the cache every 24h)

With this information I cannot say where we should start.

You have created a larger gallery so I suggest follow idea to get to the source : Please reduce the amount of images (or better create a new gallery) with just 5-10 images . Now change the shortcode to this new gallery and check if the CPU load is better or the same.

So I can have an idea if the amount of images causes the problems…

i uploaded 12 new wallpapers to a new gallery and changed the shortcut code from the previous wallpaper site to the new one https://dailymobile.se/2010/01/01/nokia-5800-n97-x6-satio-i8910hd-5530-wallpapers/

note that i didnt delete the old wallpapers, they are just not visible on the blog

Ok, that should be ok. The images on your hard disk should not causes any problem, they will not be used… If there are some problems with the script, it can be only during the rendering process of the gallery.

I’m interesting if the CPU load will be lower than before.. let me know when you have some results form your diagnostic tool

just checked the stats, the CPU is almost the same as before, it has gone down from 400 to 350 (but i have almost 200 online users less than before)

i also tried to deactivate the plugin and then it went back to normal. Could it be that the nextgen is “automatically” activated on ALL my pages? even the “non” wallpaper page?

That’s more than strange… NextGEN checks just for the shortcode, but thats the same like routine like the inbuilt gallery. I can just perpare some debug file, where we can exclude more code function , if you interested in helping contact me by mail.

can you send your email to xxxxxxxx
i cannot find your mail ??

I’d like to jump in on this conversation as it’s EXACTLY the problem I’m having myself. I certainly don’t want to hijack this thread, but I feel I have the same issue going on.

Here is a blog that I set up almost one year ago:

https://www.myportlandphotographer.com

It’s a collaborative blog of 20 wedding photographers. We have allocated 4 photographers to post each day with a short paragraph of text. As you can imagine, we have over 900 photos at this time.

Each photo is sized to 900 x 600 pixels and we use Next Gen to create a database for each shooter and it dynamically sizes the photos on the index page. If the viewer clicks the photos, it’s pulled up to full size.

We’ve had HUGE server problems this year with the traffic we’re getting and I’ve called them a number of times. We use WestHost and I’ve used them on a number of other projects, including a very robust shopping cart for my business. I’ve had their servers tested and have determined they are one of the best for SQL database intensive sites. Our original server through GoDaddy was horrible and we thought it was a database issue.

It’s been almost a year now of looking at server logs, having them analyze our site and constant testing. We have now determined that the major culprit in our sites slowness is the NextGen plugin.

We have the blog set up to display 20 posts at any given time. This is so each photographer has their work up for one full week before being kicked back into the archives.

From what we can determine, NextGen is loading the full sized images FIRST and they dynamically resizing or creating the smaller photos that are displayed on the blog. This is killing our site.

I was going to ask if there were a “lite” version that does not have all the code bloat for the slideshow and other features of NextGen that we don’t use. Also, if you look at our site using the YSlow plugin for Firefox, you’ll see a lot of Javascript issues, related directly to NextGen.

If you have any suggestions on how to resolve this issue, I’d really, really appreciate your help. As you can imagine, disabling the plugin and having to figure out some other Lightbox solution and going in and fixing a years worth of posts is quite a daunting task to face.

Thanks in advance!

what helped me was that the cache plugin i am using doesnt cache the nextgen gallery, i needed to activate the image permalink structure so that the cache plugin started to cache the nextgen html files. that helped on my server!

I was using the Super Cache plugin and it was problematic. I deactivated it over the weekend and it was very difficult to remove.

You should check out site out today (Monday) as typically the server load is overwhelmed and it’s really, really slow. I’m very frustrated right now with NextGen and how it’s working. I’m hoping to get a resolution here, but would appreciate any thoughts on another approach that would not require a month of recoding all my previous year’s posts.

??

How many vistors , siteview do you have per day ? phattrance has a lot of traffic and therefore a working cache plugin is mandatory..

randy –> try the hyper cache, then activate the permalinks in the gallery settings @ nextgen and then in hyper cache settings activate: URL with parameters. that should solve your problems!

Thanks for posting such helpful information. This one has really frustrated me for a very long time!

Alex, to answer your question, right now we’re getting about 300 unique hits a day to the blog. We’re hoping to ramp that up over the next few months. I’m not sure how many we’ve lost because the site simply wouldn’t load. We’ve struggled with this for a while now.

Phat… I downloaded and installed the Hyper Cache plugin. Activated the permalinks in the NextGen gallery Options settings and then activated URL with parameters in Hyper Cache as you suggested.

In NextGen, there is a statement “When you activate this option, you need to update your permalink structure one time.” Is this done automatically when I check this or do I need to perform this update manually and how is that done?

So far, it seems to be much more responsive. I’ve even turned on the 20 posts to show option and it’s not as sluggish as it used to be.

I’m still concerned about the NextGen plugin and fixing or optimizing it to work better in this type of situation. We are only using the Lightbox feature, so it leads me to think there is a lot of code and scripting running to make things happen that we are not utilizing.

Thanks for the continued support!

yes it will automatically change all the urls to the images, so if you have hotlinked to a image before you need to change the url… thats whats the plugn is telling you with the instructions ??