Coppermine Issues?

I've been happily using one of the early(er) versions of Coppermine for quite some time on a lighly-used Dreamhost-hosted domain; it's full featured, easy to install, easy to maintain, supports a passel of language files, and comes with several nice looking built-in themes. You can tell I like it.

I was preparing to install a gallery script on a much more heavily used domain for a fanart gallery of mine, and one of the newest versions of Coppermine was obviously where I looked first.

However, I recently heard from someone who said his Coppermine install was causing major problems with his Dreamhost server, to the point that Dreamhost might disable it entirely. Speed and low impact on the shared server (which usually go hand in hand) are always primary concerns of mine, so this "rumor" concerns me greatly.

Has anybody else run Coppermine without issue on a DH server, or is there some other relatively lightweight image management script I can look to in lieu of it?

The latest version of coppermine v1.3 was still beta the last time I looked, that could be the problem.

I have v1.2 installed and have not had any problems, although it is not a heavy traffic site.

The mysql usage is not that heavy, but I can imagine a very busy gallery with regards to uploads might be problematic on a shared service. i.e. GD/ImageMagik processing the upload images for the thumbnails etc.

There is also a suggestion to remove the random frame from the frontpage if you have a very large gallery.

I'm running two installations of coppermine (one each of 1.1 and 1.2) and neither one seems problematic. It would be good to know what specific issues the person is experiencing. Maybe I have a problem and don't know it :-)

The fellow said that every time he tried to batch upload pictures, it would completely bog down the server and make DH unhappy for obvious reasons. (I also just realized that I forgot to send the reply I'd written to him... ouch.)

Perhaps it's just that one particular feature causing the problems; when Coppermine gets a bunch of images at the same time, it goes all out with ImageMagik/GD/whatever and uses way too much processor. You'd think it'd have some sort of load-balancing code chunk in there, or PHP/whatever balances the load on DH servers would take care of it, but then maybe not.

Anybody tried this feature, with or without success? Perhaps as long as you stay away from batch uploads it's ok?

Ah. I use the XP publish wizard but never for more than around 30 images (at most...typically only four or five at a time).

This thread seems to suggest that XP publish is the way to go if server load is a problem with batch (and if it's an option for you).

http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/board/index.php?topic=5844.0

I have never used the batch upload feature so that might be why I have never seen the problem.

Having read over the thread that haggis has posted to a link to, I would agree that batch upload of alot of images is insane on a shared host.

It would be better if at the very least you had the option not to create multiple processor threads. So you get the convience of the batch upload that will be processed in the background (albeit slowly) but at least not bring the shared server to its knees.

Interesting thread and handy to know

Thanks for the heads up on that thread; guess that confirms my guess above pretty clearly. Still seems like the Coppermine folks could've put at least some sort of load-friendly code in there to reduce the chances of this happening, but it looks like so long as I lay off the batch add feature it won't be an issue.

Wasn't planning on using it much if at all anyway, so hopefully it'll be safe to give Coppermine a go.