Great idea to speed SMARTOR Photo Gallery up

[Mighty Gorgon]

Thanks JLA.

I partially agree in what you are saying regarding FAP, because it is true that it has many features which may not be suitable for big galleries, but it is true as well that most of them may be disabled with a single click in ACP.

Plus I spent many hours in coding GD functions, and trying to figure out how to speed up thumbnails generations and optimize images handling, and I'm sure you will like some of the features FAP has... multiple uploads, instant gallery without db, pics rss, fast thumbs, pics bbcodes, slideshows...

For example if you try to load any gallery page on my site you will see that thumbnails are instantly generated because I've changed the way thumbnails are generated/shown: in FAP you can enable fast thumbs feature which generates a copy of the thumbnails in cache using an encrypted name, so no extra CPU charge and DB access to retrieve pics informations, but thumbs are instantly loaded using the IMG tag (no risk for original pics, because thumbs name are encrypted and different from the original pics names).

Anyway, each big site needs some extra customizations and I agree on the fact that if you are able to do it on your own, you may prefer having a light and stable package (like Smartor's Album is) instead of a big and possibly resource wasting (if not configured properly) package.


P.S.: I have registered at your site, but I had an SMTP error after the registration and no email has been sent to activate my account. Can you please activate it? Thanks.
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Luca

[JLA]

[Mighty Gorgon]

[JLA]

[JLA]

We have an update on our progress to speed up the Smartor Photo Album Gallery.

As you may have last read, we had significantly improved the speed of the album index by removing much of the function and moving the cat count to a static value. We also added a full search feature that had cached results. There were still a few problems. At the time our galleries had over 500,000 pictures so the following problems still existed.

1. Album Cat, Album Page and Album pic still were too slow
2. The initial search for a terms too WAY TOO LONG. It was find after that as the results were cached but the initial search would take forever.

We finally worked out these issues and now our gallery is at 900,000 pictures and it is running GREAT!.

We solved the album cat, album page and album pic issue by

1. Removing the poorly written queries that included unnecessary joins - moved the cat count to a static value and reassigned some variables.

2. Improved the search to get rid of the %LIKE% and went with MATCH AGAINST in BOOLEAN mode instead. Searches are lightning fast now. Of course the permissions system is in full effect for all searches as well.


One of the nagging issues we had was the removal on album index of the last post info. We finally solved this by using an album cache to cache last post info so now we have for each category a thumbnail for the last posted picture along with last posted picture information too.

We have taken this mod to a whole new level with these changes and see that this mod will support our 10 million picture capacity with no further problems.
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