Forum Speed

[qsiv]

Well - I've seen at least part of the problem!

The Mirabella photo album is stashed with some great photos - but the full size images are 4 MB - a little JPEG compression would yield very adequate viewing.

I've compressed it to 256 KB - and it still looks just fine (it wouldnt printed). It looks like someone has dropped rather HiRes images straight out of the Cannon 10D that the photographer used (1/30 at f5.6) with little thought a to bandwidth issues!

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[BrendanS]

Speed issues were with server and database. Bandwidth doesn't seem to be an issue - it's big and burstable according to Kim

Size of piccies is another matter though - could be a lot smaller

<hr width=100% size=1> I asked an economist for her phone number....and she gave me an estimate

 

[qsiv]

It certainly took an age to download - and there isnt a database involved with Gallery...

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[kimhollamby]

Oh bother

Thanks for the alert. The Mirabella gallery is run by the editorial team who have clearly got a bit carried away with some of the images. That said the impact will not have dented the forum speed at all because we have plenty of bandwidth our end...bit of a lump for someone on a modem though.

I'll get them edited.

Kim

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[kimhollamby]

In fact...

I take it all back...the images were put in there full size so the mag art team could pull them down in the office at the time. You have to treble click to get the monster images; otherwise you get the resized ones which are smaller.

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[qsiv]

Re: In fact...

Well - I'm used to Gallery and getting progressively greater resolution - but I would have thought that if that was their sole objective a private FTP location might be better!

I'm in the process of 'tweaking' Gallery's code to show the the size of the next image in the enlargement process - just to give people a warning, as I have some largeish images on my site. Incidentally the newer versions of Gallery have some really nice features, in particular notification on updates is good.

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[kimhollamby]

You are right

But we cannot use our main web farm for FTP pic traffic due to security issues and the FTP server we do have outside of the firewall for this purpose is causing trouble, hence the dodgy workaround. Only a temporary fix.

I must admit we haven't 'loved' the Gallery very much; we ought to take a look at it sometime in the new year or even swap it out for something a bit more in keeping with the rest of the site.



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[qsiv]

Re: You are right

Ah! Not for public consumption - trust me to tramp around!

The newer versions of gallery are quite a lot better - and some of the commercially available skins are good, and Gallery 2 is huge step forward.

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[kimhollamby]

Re: You are right

Ummm...yes Gallery for us was the supposed 'short term fix' to save me building more complicated pages that were in fact more functional and pretty...but labour intensive...every time we did RTIR, Cowes or the like.

It works and therefore we have tended to leave it alone, not least because there's not the same pressure, as on here for example, to update and adapt. It looks horrible but it has served a purpose. Now you have made me upset with it I expect we'll give it a look in the new year!

Strangely enough we couldn't use a Threads update even if we wanted to now, for the forums, because it would actually take us backwards, such has been the amount of inc dev applied to it locally here. As you have so candidly pointed out we cannot claim the same for Gallery!

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