PhotoPost 5.2 Performance FAQ

[Michael P]

PhotoPost 5.2 includes a new caching system that can significantly improve page generation times for small, medium and large websites; however, as sites grow, you may be looking to tweak your site even more.

By default, PhotoPost enables many features that will not cause any noticeable delay in generation times, but when your site grows beyond, say 100k images, can cause your pages to load slower. If this is the case, here are some suggestions to improve your page generation times:

Who's browsing a forum. In your Admin Options... Index Options... is "Display number of viewers on categories?" - this option, when turned on, requires an additional query to generate the index page (xxx viewing) tag next to each category. Turning this feature OFF will reduce the save that query.

Who's Online. In Admin Options... Sidebar Options... "Use Whos Online PAL?" - turning this feature off will also save the additional query to generate this section.

New Photo/Comment Indicator. In Admin Options... Index Options... "Display new comments/photos indicator on index?". Turning this option off can save several queries as when enabled PhotoPost will track the last time online for any user browsing the gallery. If you have a large number of users on your site, this can use alot of space; turning this option off can have a dramatic improvement in page generation times across the whole gallery as PhotoPost will no longer try to track a user's last time in every gallery.

Turn off PALs. These sidebat features consume resources - from Recent Comments, Who's Online, Highest Rated, Top Posters and the Calender PAL all require additional queries to generate. Try turning all your PALs off in the Admin Options... Sidebar Settings... and then adding back any you like to see what kind of performance hit you take. In sites with a large number of comments, you may find that turning off the Recent Comments PAL provides a significant boost. The Calendar PAL can also use additional resources on large sites and turn it off can reduce that overhead.

IP Caching. In Admin Options... Global Settings... "Enable IP Cache Timeout" - set this to 0 so as to not track IP addresses for viewing and voting purposes.

Some final suggestions:

For large sites, try to keep the number of Recent, Popular or Random image blocks to a reasonable number - 30 or 40 images per block can be excessive.

Reduce the number of comments displayed per page. This can save queries on the showphoto page as it reduces the number required to lookup user info.

Tweak you cache timing. In Admin Options... Global Options... "Minutes to cache index page data for featured photos, statistics and PALs?" - by default 10 minutes is the norm. You can put in a higher value to use your cache longer - the cache will force itself to refresh when a photo is uploaded, a comment is made or some other change would make refreshing the cache necessary. The cache will cause your "random" images to be the same for this period of time, but the longer you can use your cache, the less the cache has to be regenerated.