[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Unusually High Server Loads

I was posting to another thread with a similar topic, but didn’t want to hijack the original author’s post.

I manage a blog with 20 contributing photographers. We use NextGEN so that each photographer has their own gallery to manage. Also, we use NextGEN to display the image within the post and when the image is clicked it displays at it’s full 900 pixel size using the Thickbox option. The slideshow function is disabled.

We are having HUGE server load issues. I’ve been working with our hosting company for months trying to resolve this issue. Lately, it’s been so bad that we are at risk of having our site quarantined and banned until it’s resolved. So, I’m working hard to figure out what’s happening.

I did some tests with a plugin for Firefox called YSLOW and there are a lot of things happening, but it appears that most of the problem areas point to NextGEN. I’ve also narrowed it down to a few other things. At this point, I’m trying to isolate issues until I figure it out.

We have the blog set up to only show 8 posts at a time. Our design is simple. At most, we get 500 hits in a day. Not a lot and it should be quite nimble. What should I be looking at or tweaking within NextGEN? Am I correct in assuming the larger images are loading in the background? Is there a way to disable that feature so that it only loads the full sized 900 pixel image when the viewer clicks on the image? What am I missing?

The other things it could be are simply a bad theme. We are using a modified version of the Linquist theme. I’m looking into taking the default WP theme and making one from scratch. My webhost told me that a poorly written theme could gobble up lots of server RAM. I also read an article that stated WP itself is a performance hog.

As a last resort, if we were to abandon NextGEN altogether, how do we migrate a year’s worth of posts (20 per weeks x 52 weeks) from the NextGEN galleries to a new file structure, more of a traditional structure? I’m assuming that would be a very daunting, hand coding weekend of fun, right?