Zenphoto
The simpler media website CMS
ZenphotoThe simpler media website CMS
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zenPhoto 1.6.8 on Netfirms webhosting server PHP 8.4.7 MySQL 5.7.44
host platform "gets real busy" ??? when caching new photos ?
create a test directory
create an empty database
copy zp1.6.8 to test directory
run setup ../zptest/zp-core/setup.php
setup seems to work fine, db written, license acknowledged, admin user created
logout from admin
login to admin ../zptest/zp-core/admin.php
move site to test mode
View gallery - looks OK empty gallery
Albums > New Album > Our Cars
View gallery - looks OK gallery with empty album
click on album Our Cars - looks OK no photos to display
FTP 35 jpg files to zptst/albums/Our-Cars
View gallery - looks OK gallery with 1 thumbnail displayed
click on album Our Cars - (a random?) 6 images are displayed and the rest are gray blocks and url in browser show circle like the page is waiting or somethig
The page does let me select Admin and go back to the admin page
If I now go back to the View Gallery I am back at the Gallery with 1 album shown and same thumbnail
Clicking on the thumbnail I get the same album with the same few thumbnails displayed and most of the photos gray blocks and the browser url circling like the page is busy.
This all works fine on MAMP so I assume this is some sort of server issue. Unfortunately I only have FTP access to the server and no access to apache or php logs, etc (as far as I know).
I am looking for any clues as to what to ask the webhosting support team for
P.S. after waiting minutes at the album the URL spinning stops and the page has changed from gray blocks to image titles with broken image icons
Clicking on any of the images (ones with thumbnails or with bronken image icon) and no image is displayed only the image title
next and prev navigate through the image titles but no images are ever displayed
accessing the public URL gives fancy upgrade message
Gallery is undergoing an upgrade
Please return later
Now go back to admin and open the site
When I click Apply the URL spinner happens again
https://italiancarclubottawa.ca/zptst/zp-core/utilities/maintenance_mode.php?XSRFToken=2e03bc3ef7a6f14fffd1d1f8cab8e3b936d823b1
After about 2 minutes I get
Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
If I try to go to the admin page
https://italiancarclubottawa.ca/zptst/zp-core/admin.php
I can enter my username and password but it just sits there with the URL spinning
If I go to the public URL
https://italiancarclubottawa.ca/zptst
I get the same fancy site upgrade message - no waiting
Comments
Of course it does, it is the most power and memory consuming task. As mentioned I do not recommend to upload hundreds or thousands of images at the time via ftp. It is likely overloading your server especially if these are large dimension images.
Especially if this is rather shared hosting. Perhaps you over did this a little with your backend refreshing and your host shut it down temporarily.
https://www.zenphoto.org/news/problems-with-albums-and-images/
MAMP is good to simulate but not the same as a real server of course.
You can pre-create cached images on MAMP and upload them, too if needed.
The "Gallery is undergoing an upgrade" is the maintenance mode page which you can disable on the backend. It would not enable itself.
Also review you logs.. You likely find some memory issues or similar.
Ok
I started again and added photos 1 at a time for 10 photos and all was fine
I then added 10 photos at a time and when I looked at the album it did the spinning URL (on Chrome) again (and eventually minutes later image broken icon)
I guess my shared hosting is very CPU or memory limited or both.
I have deleted the contents of the albums in the test builds on the hosting server and I still can't get back into the admin console to figure out what size thumbnails to generate in MAMP (times out).
I am finding a number of different sizes in the cache/photo album directory
I assume that the cache_html directory is not used for this?
I guess I need help from the hosting company to unblock my user.
This had been working in the past (on my 1.5.9 based site) from the same hosting company. It only broke as I tried to update zp before switching to PHP8
For each event our club would have I would FTP up 100 photos or so and everything worked fine.
Now I can't even upload 10 photos without the timeouts and remainder of cache images never being created ...
I don't think it is feasible to offline generate the thumbnails everytime I need to add more than a few photos at a time...
Are there specific asks I can make for the user CPU or memory quota (assuming that they are somehow restricting me on that)
I guess the thumbnails are configured in Options > Theme
except that those items don't seem to be able to be changed though I can change the cropped or not setting
FYI - according to the host support team there are 2 issues.
"Currently, PHP 8.4 is set up for your website. I'm glad to inform you that our engineers identified the file /public_html/zp-data/.mutex/zP is causing the 503 Service Unavailable error."
But I don't know what the cause of this could be. The file also gets recreated when accessing the admin panel. But working for now.
Secondly they said this
"Further, our engineers found that the following extensions have been enabled in the php.ini file, and these extensions, when added to php.ini, make the website not work properly. So I have now removed these extensions.
extension=propro.so
extension=raphf.so
extension=ctype.so"
I don't know exactly what "not work properly" means and the impact of removing those extensions but let's try adding some photos ...
The mutex file is to limit to processes like the image processing to help to not overload a server.
Those three php extension are not required by Zenphoto and to my knowledge not used.