performance display of category list

[hweseman]

Hi Jan,

I am a new user of Phoca Gallery which does most of what I require of a photo gallery, thank you very much Jan! However I have a problem for which I hope you have a solution.

I have at the moment 843 pictures that I have organized in 42 categories. They are based on events like holidays, celebrations etc. The category titles start with year and a sequence number, for instance: 2009 (3) holiday in Spain. The category list is displayed in descending order, so the most recent category is displayed first, pagination is set to 20.

The problem I have is that is takes 35 seconds to display the category list. Using pagination to go to the next 20 also takes 35 seconds. This is pretty long and I fear it will be much longer when I have added all my pictures to the gallery, about 10,000 in total. On a test system with 12 categories it takes about 6 seconds.

I thought it would help if I create a descending index on column title of the jos_phocagallery_categories table, but no.

The web host I am using (bluehost.com) is usually very fast.

Any ideas?

Thanks & regards,

Harry

[hweseman]

I found a solution for my problem. All my categories were at the highest level, I decided to create a top category called "Albums" and made all categories into subcategories of "Albums". I then changed the type of gallery in the Joomla menu, from "Phoca Gallery Category List Layout" to "Phoca Gallery Category Layout" and selecting "Albums" as the category.

I experimented with the settings until I had a list of categories in descending order, ie with the most recent on top. The performance is excellent, the list of 42 categories is displayed within a second.

My only problems left are:

- I can't get the pagination to work on the list of categories, the list is 42 categories now but will become more than 100 (maybe I should introduce another level, grouping the albums per year?)
- at the bottom there is a line saying "There is no image in this category", which is true as there is no image in the "Albums" category, but I would like that line not to appear.

[Jan]

Hi, the line you can remove in html (in template of category view)

Try to check parameters basic and parameters component (where you can enable pagination and set values for pagination). Check if the changes of menu link paramaters are the changes for the current menu link (if you will disable SEF, you can check it with Itemid - the itemid should be same for menu link parameters and the menu link where you don't get the pagination)

Jan