Thumbnails Load Very Slowly

cpalmisano

I have read through all the performance posts and tried out nearly all of the hacks and still can't seem to improve performance of ZP.

With only one ore two albums, ZP was lightning fast. But now with over 1,000 images in 20+ albums, it's very slow.

For whatever reason, the loading of thumbnails is by far the slowest.

Can anyone offer any suggestions? I feel like I've tried everything; including modifying php.ini.

http://v2.thepalmisanos.com

acrylian

Seems to me that your site in general is a little slow. I am not sure if that is really a Zenphoto/Zenpage issue (btw. nice Zenpage adaption! Don't forget to submit to the show case later!). That generating the thumbs will take some time is because you have really big images with 3000x2000 pixels. But after that is done it should be faster. The views inside an album and the image itself is quite fast. So one thing you could try is to choose a specific image for the album thumb so that they are not randomly choosen.

Please try that and report if that speeds things up as expected. Another user already suggested that random selection should not be default and I now tend to agree to that.

cpalmisano

Thanks for the fast response Acrylian.

Turning off random image may help somewhat but it only addresses a small part of the problem.

When I drill down into an album, ZP still has to display the 20 thumbnails on each page before the user clicks into a specific image. Turning off random thumbnails will have no effect on load time for album specific thumbnails.

In my production environment, I'm running Drupal with the Gallery 2 set up as a plugin. I absolutely hate it. The admin control panel is a nightmare and the Gallery 2 implementation into Drupal is nothing short of a debacle. But as you can see, the performance loading thumbnails is substantially faster than ZP.

I love the way ZP works, I just need to find a way to improve performance.

acrylian

Sorry to say but from here in Europe the gallery 2 site does not really appear faster than the zenphoto one.I noticed it several times on the site of a fellow dev that it was much slower for him than for me.

But I am / we are concerned about reports like yours of course. Are the permissions on the cache folder correctly?

cpalmisano

Acrylian,
Cache permissions set to 777.

Per your suggestion, I went through all the albums and manually selected a thumbnail for each. Much to my surprise, it made a big difference on the speed for all album pages.

I also went through and renamed my folders to URL friendly formats, removing spaces, caps and funky characters. I think this may have helped as well.

The trips section now seems much faster for me.

I definitely think random thumbnails should be disabled by default.

cpalmisano

I take it back, the album thumbnails are back to loading slowly.

I checked with my host (Dreamhost) to confirm that my shared server is not under extraordinary load and they confirmed that it is not.

This is so frustrating, I really want to deploy ZP, but have to fix these performance issues first.

albeezie

Hey there.

I also use Dreamhost and I too have a ton of photos, but I haven't experienced major lag. It seems to me that your photos are being cached as the pages are loaded... I believe you would benefit from pre-caching your images

cpalmisano

Hey Albezzie,
I tried pre-caching of the images with no positive effect on load time.

Thanks for the tip though.

cpalmisano

Albeezie,
I viewed your site and it does seem to load very fast. One thing I noticed, your full size images are 800px wide and mine are about 3000px wide. That may explain the discrepancy in performance.

Are you resizing all your images before upload?

albeezie

Actually, I do resize all my images first. I prefer not to give out my full sized images.

cpalmisano

Anyone else using Dreamhost and uploading full size images?