High CPU load when processing photos

[gholsie]

Hi guys. I have a concern about something related to my gallery. I'm using Photopost Pro VB3 integrated with vBulletin/vbPortal.

Server is a Fedora Core 4 system with dual Xeon 3.0GHz processors and 3GB RAM. OS is installed on a single 120GB IDE drive.

Photopost Settings:
GD2
Zlib page compression YES
Load limit 0
Minutes to cache index page 10
Category cache YES

vBulletin 3.6.4
vbPortal 3.6.2

I was getting reports from users saying that it takes an extra long time to upload and process photos. So, the users sent me about 60 photos. Each photo is about 800KB.

I then uploaded the photos to a local directory on the server and went to the upload screen. I uploaded the files from the local directory in the users name.

When I did this, I opened a SSH2 shell and watched the processes. What I noticed is a single HTTPD process went to 98% CPU load. It would not come down at all. In fact, it never came back down until after the images were processed by Photopost (GD2?).

My question is... the server should have plenty of horsepower and memory to handle this process without an issue. Why would it consume so much processor ? Is there something I need to change to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future? Uploads do seem to take forever and I don't think it's the actual upload time, but, it's the processing time.

Any help is appreciated. Users are staying away from my gallery because it takes too much time.

-- Mike