X3Photo Gallery Forums

I had the same. But after i turned of open_basedir, it is very fast!

globetrotter wrote:When I change something on my site, it takes a long time before I can see the results.

First of all, let me explain that this is how X3 works ... When you "change" anything in your X3 website, it invalidates the cached pages. The next time you visit any page, it needs to re-process all data again, including the relatively heavy menu. Therefore, it will always be "slower" after you make changes, but will speed up once pages and templates get cached.

When your page is "cached", it is OK fast:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/b79toJ/ ... ternet.nl/
(The main html document loads in after 1.5 seconds wait)

globetrotter wrote:The site will not load most of the times.

Yes I experienced this today also. I really don't like to blame hosting services when an X3 website fails to load, but your hosting service is simply under-powered, or more likely "over-shared". Your website didn't have a huge amount of folders, and it still doesn't manage to process them. To be honest, I have posted it earlier also, you would need to be very lucky if you are hosting on a 3$ service and they offer sufficient resources. I don't even understand their pricing:You are on the "professional" package, which is more GB (ok), but how do they quantify "2x CPU" I wonder, when it is shared between 1000s of users ...

globetrotter wrote:Sometimes I have to wait for 15 minutes, several hours or even untill the next day. I try to refresh the page every 5 minutes or so.

Your website has a 60-second timeout, so it simply times out. The only reason it maybe works the next day, is perhaps because your page was accessed once at some time when there are less visitors on your over-shared hosting service.

globetrotter wrote:Also 'Create Menu' does not work always. Most of the times I see the error: 503 Service Unavailable.
Other moments it is ready in a few seconds. Then the site will load OK.

The create-menu is proportional with the general site timeout, because it is the most heavy process. When it loads quickly, it's likely because the menu-fragment is already cached.

globetrotter wrote:But most of the times I have the same problems.
Maybe my webspace host is not fast enough or it is to busy on internet sometimes? Or some configuration mistakes?

Unfortunately, it is the hosting. You could try the open_basedir-fix as suggested by @Scoop643, but personally I can't see any logical reason that would speed things up dramatically.

Suggestions
- First of all, the speed (and failure) is directly related to the amount of folders and files in your content structure. Try to RENAME the sample "3.examples" folder to "_examples" which an underscore before the name. This should prevent it from being taken into account when the system is looping through folders. Avoid unnecessary folders/content.
- Change host. This is the ultimate fix beyond doubt. This host may work until you get to a certain amount of files and images, but that's it.
- I Checked the host again ... I really don't see how they quantify their resources provided, but their naming is inappropriate. It would only be logical to guess that the two bottom packages are for really light static websites ... They really don't offer much resources. You could try next package up, although even they are considered "cheap", and I really don't know how much better they will perform on this host.
- After things are "working", you can fortify your website by using cloudflare. (see post here)

mjau-mjau wrote:Unfortunately, it is the hosting. You could try the open_basedir-fix as suggested by @Scoop643, but personally I can't see any logical reason that would speed things up dramatically.

I have a Synology NAS box at home and I use it to mirror my website and test things. It has an Apache web server running on it. Considering its on a LAN, for the longest time I couldn't figure why it was so incredible slow and would timeout when used. It was completely unusable with X3. As globetrotter described

globetrotter wrote:Website very slow and sometimes errors. When I change something on my site, it takes a long time before I can see the results. The site will not load most of the times. Sometimes I have to wait for 15 minutes...

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Yup -things would take forever and end on error. For me, the website would mostly timeout on error before actually appearing in the browser. Basically about the only thing I could do was bring up the panel and LOOK at things, but not much more.

Like Scoop643 turning off the open_basedir was the difference between 99.5% non-functional to 100% awesome. The Synology box defaults the open_basedir to multiple directories. In my case I had to delete the list of directories and set it to 'none'. Now everything works perfectly and amazingly fast. If you haven't tried it, I would HIGHLY recommend at least trying to turn off the open_basedir with your site provider before wasting any more time. It certainly helped at least two of us out here. Difference = night vs. day!

After changing someting i needed to wait for example 15 minutes, but after that 15 minutes it was fast, very fast. No problems with the speed, until i changed something. I needed to wait 10 - 15 minutes again...

I don't know why, maybe a bad host, but turning off open_basedir was the solution...

I think you should ask your host...

Although open_basedir may make a difference, keep in mind in this example you are running a personal Apache server, so that would naturally be very fast. In the case of this specific request, it is hard to believe that this $2.5 host is not running completely over-shared servers with minimal resources.

globetrotter wrote:I am not sure if and where I can turn open_basedir to off? My site is hosted at a shared hosting provider. I will look into it later. And ask their support. Is open_basedir some safety option? Maybe they don't want to change it?

Yes, it prevents PHP access to certain operations in parent folders. Doesn't really affect the X3 application logic, but it could be this setting is creating an unnecessary process for each file-read operation from PHP, which there is an abundance of in X3. Especially if the DISK is not on the same physical server as the processing unit (PHP), it could make a huge difference. I doubt a host like this would allow you to turn it off. You can let them see this post.

globetrotter wrote:They told me that their servers are not overshared..

Speed is always something we will look into from X3, but we can't do magic. Especially if you have a heavy structure which needs to get processed each time you makes changes from the panel. Personally I don't believe a host that claims they are "not over-shared" if they offer 2-3$ monthly hosting. Then it wouldn't be slow. The BEST RATED hosting company, currenty SITEGROUND, start at 9.95$ (although they have intro price first yr 60% off).

globetrotter wrote:And it is not possible to turn of open_basedir, because then I have access to the webspace of the other customers of them.

Although someone reported this, I really don't see any logical reasons why open_basedir OFF should speed up your gallery. There could be a sublime difference in performance, but everything still needs to get processed. Are you using latest version of X3 btw?

globetrotter wrote:But I was trying something else... A long while ago I switched on SSL (https) at my host.
Last week I did turn off SSL again, and now Imagevue looks better and faster with creating the menu etcera (most of the times).

When SLL was turned on, sometimes I got the wrong colors in Imagevue.
I am using blue, but sometimes I did see the standard yellow text and loading 'bar'.
Also the 3D text was then bigger than I had set.

But since I turned off SSL, I did not see the wrong colors and wrong 3D text again....

Two answers:

1. SSL could offer some minimal performance benefits, but not really in the department of speeding up the processing power. It is simply unrelated. It could offer better download speeds if your server also supports HTTP/2.

2. If you are switching between HTTPS and HTTP, then technically you are switching domain names used for X3. Cached templates may be referring cross-protocol, and this could cause issues when loading CSS and/or JS files. If you switch between them, you need to save something from the panel before previewing, to make sure new page outputs are created. You will not see any difference.

globetrotter wrote:I have contacted the helpdesk of my webhost one.com,They told me that their servers are not overshared.

My hostingprovider is Antagonist in the Netherlands. Just check it out...
I think my site is pretty fast, but it may be that you've got more images in your galleries.
Furthermore I'm using Cloudflare...

Speed of web hosting is subject to so many factors ... Not only are available resources (CPU, RAM) crucial (and how many you share them with), but also for example if you are on a "GRID" server, your files may be spread across multiple physical servers ... which in turn means that all the "looping" that X3 does to read folders and images, may have to go between different physical locations.

Martin wrote:My hostingprovider is Antagonist in the Netherlands. Just check it out...

Antagonist offer SSD (Solid State Drive) disks, which means X3 can loop through the content MUCH faster than on conventional drives. Most hosts offer SSD these days. It certainly is a factor.

Martin wrote:Furthermore I'm using Cloudflare...

If you are using the special "page caching" feature we wrote about, then pages will be super fast. However, Cloudflare will not have any impact on the creation-time of pages AFTER you make changes from the panel (until they get re-cached) ... The page still needs to get rendered on your server, before it gets cached both in the X3-cache and on the Cloudflare cache. Cloudflare basic does offer some general performance benefits outside of the "page rendering", but that does not generally include the output of page-data from your server.

globetrotter wrote:I have moved to another webhosting. Now everything is working very wel.
When I click on the 'create menu' button, it is ready in a few seconds.

Nice! May I ask who the host is?