Does anyone have any experience with coppermine hosting +70k pictures?

[crippe]

Does anyone have any experience with coppermine hosting +70k pictures? I'm sure the script will work fine, but will it still work fast enough? Do you have any experince or thoughts about this please post it here ;-)

Regards

Crippe

[Joachim Müller]

This depends on the file size, traffic and various other parameters, there's no general recommendations we could give. There's a thread that deals with web hosting recommendations in  http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=15187.0
I have seen coppermine installs with such a huge amount of pics flawlessly, but after all it's not a question of files in the db, but how many visitors you expect to have and what traffic they will generate. As a rule of thumb the index page of your gallery is most critical, as it will eat up most resources. Try to have as few as possible meta albums there, and show less details on it to save traffic and bandwidth.

Joachim

[crippe]

Thanks for your input GauGau, much appriciated !

Regards

Crippe

[TerryG]

Hey Crippe,

We're not at 70k pictures (and because of prudent pruning we probably never will be) but we are seeing a lot of traffic, and recently I had to spend some time figuring out why we were consuming over 35 GB of bandwidth in one month.  Since I want to grow the site to approximately ten times the amount of current traffic, I had to figure out where the bandwidth was going and how to fix it.  Here's what I found:

1.  EXIF data in thumbnails will bloat your primary index page.  And since it changes often it is almost guaranteed to be never cached by the browser.  You MUST ensure that the thumbnails are not greater than a couple K size each.  Changing ImageMagick parameters will accomplish this (there are topic threads about how to do it), I don't know about GD.

2.  Huge HTML indentation.  This may sound odd, but last month we served 216,883 pages.  I noticed that the theme I was using had a whole lot of indentation going on.  The index page works out to be about 1650 lines of HTML, and about 1/2 of the lines were indented (on average) 20 spaces, making for almost 16500 useless space characters per page.  Times the number of pages per month = 3,578,569,500 chars = 3.4 Gb  (Can someone check my math?)

3.  Poor layout design.  I noticed a TON of references to spacer.gif in each each page.  Removing the majority of them and replacing them with CSS styling attached to elements reduced the number of external references AND page size significantly.

NOTE -- to get an idea about how your pages are doing in terms of efficiency I highly recommend NS's "Page Info" window -- it will allow you to check on all sorts of interesting things about a page once it's been loaded. 

Good luck with your big site

Terry

[Joachim Müller]

try using output compression (if supported on your server).