Very slow load time with multiple galleries

[ronakg]

Very slow load time with multiple galleries

[jturello-ulink]

Hi, I have the same issue. I tried to limit the number of photo per post/page in Awesome Flickr Gallery settings (now at 8 pictures), but I didn't help.

I also tried to activate a cache in wordpress (Supercache plugin), but still ultra slow to display!

In fact, as soon as I activate the AFG plugin, the whole Wordpress install goes very slow (admin interface too)! When I deactivate the plugin, site + admin are fast again.

@justynspooner do you have the same problem in admin interface, or is it just slow when loading the galleries?

Edit: I precise that I use WP version 3.9.1 and Awesome Flickr Gallery version 3.5.0

[ronakg]

Images are not cached on the host, they are directly served from Flickr. That's better as it puts less load on your hosting server and Flickr's response time in general is better than shared hosting most users have.

The slowness you are seeing is because of the REST call to api.flickr.com that plugin has to make. AFG has to make at least one call per gallery to flickr, which is relatively slow. I can provide an option in plugin where this call can be avoided, but you'd have to manually fetch data whenever you upload new photos on Flickr.

[jturello-ulink]

In fact I have 100 galleries in AFG, so there should be at least 100 REST calls when loading any wordpress page (by the way, does this include admin interface pages?), which can explains the slowness!

So yes, it would be great if you could create this option to enable/disable calls!

Thanks

[justynspooner]

I think this article describes the problem we're having. http://wp-events-plugin.com/tutorials/caching-thumbnails-generated-by-timthumb/

If that is the case, then I'm wondering whether using TimThumb is beneficial for a small site? The excessive PHP processing to display the gallery seems over kill. I'd prefer to have a cache of thumbnails on my website host and then any larger images to be requested on demand from flickr.

I've only briefly looked into this but does the above sound about right?

[ronakg]

TimThumb comes into picture only when you don't use one of the predefined sizes for thumbnails.

Having images cached on the host is not better than serving them from Flickr.com. When I go to your website on my browser, the images come from Flickr.com instead of your host. So your host has to do less amount of work to render the same page.

I'll put an option in advanced settings to disable this call. This should help users who have lot of galleries on same page.

[jturello-ulink]

Thanks @ronakg ! It would be great to have such an option!

By the way, I found out that the 3.5.0 version was the cause of the slowness of my entire wordpress install (including web pages and admin interface); When i manually installed version 3.3.5 of AFG the problem was solved; It still slow when displaying pages with several galleries, but this will be solved with your fix.

[ronakg]

I've added an option to set cache refresh interval in advanced settings page. Configure this according to your usage.