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Speaking of which... Why is the Picture Gallery so slow?

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James L

(A)

In Reply to: Picture Gallery, anyone? posted by Ole on January 29, 2003 at 09:23:37:

I've always wondered about that. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm not even a contributor, so I've no right to. Is the gallery served over a different Internet connection, or is the outgoing bandwidth being capped?
Jim

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Re: Speaking of which... Why is the Picture Gallery so slow? - Rod M 08:34:10 01/30/03 (2)
I don't know. Slow how?
The Gallery runs on a separate server that also handles the Classifieds. They're all connected to the same T1. I can only guess that you're referring to the picture load times. The pictures can be fairly large, so load times depend on your connection and the load on the T1. During the day, from 6AM-6PM PST, our T1 is maxed for the most part, so it could be timing out and waiting due to traffic.
Also, last week, hackers were probing at a Microsoft SQL Server weakness which caused problems in general. We were secure, but the volume of probes overloaded routers and caused connections to be intermittent and slow. If it's better now, that might have been the reason.
- Re: Speaking of which... Why is the Picture Gallery so slow? - James L 12:06:54 01/30/03 (1)
  Here's what I notice from either of my connections (dual T1 at the office and 1.5Mbps cable at home):
  - Forums are pretty quick, even when the connection is oviously maxed out. Occasionally, I'll see some lag when clicking on a link. For example the current Speaker Asylum page (103k in size) loads in just a couple of seconds.
  - Photos load slowly, even small (50-60k) ones.
  - The opening page of the gallery, showing inmate names, date updated, etc. is also slow to load.
  - Inmate galleries and the thumbnails themselves load pretty quickly, even those with dozens of thumbnails.
  - Classifieds are fast.
  I'd take a look at the view.pl script, or possibly the i.pl script on the page that shows the full-sized photo:
```
 img src="/cgi/i.pl?u=users/64&f=D500.jpg" width=300 height=534 
```
  But I'd bet a static reference to the image files, rather than using another sript, would be faster. This is what you've done with the thumbnails themselves:
```
 img src=http://img.AudioAsylum.com/users/64/thumb/D500.jpg 
```
  Jim
  - Re: Speaking of which... Why is the Picture Gallery so slow? - Rod M 17:35:55 01/30/03 (0)
    Actually, I think what you're noticing for the most part is that the image server takes a bit more time to connect to the db. Opening the main gallery page is completely limited by the time of the db connect. I noticed that same thing a long time ago and put in some timers, it's all in the connect. That connect time also affects the image display script. Yes, static image links would be somewhat faster, but it also makes logging image displays and controlling bandwidth usage difficult. Thus far, bandwidth has not been a real issue, but if someone put in an image that got 10 zillion hits in a day, it'd kill the server. We have to have some way to load that bandwidth and turn it off if needed. Agreed, it's not the most elequent solution, but it works.

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