Gallery 2 - then, now, and the future?

So I was looking through Google search results for "gallery2 hosting" and came across a post called "Gallery 2 sucks" at (vangel.3ezy.com/archives/62-Gallery2-Sucks.html)

Among other things, I read his frustration about the platform in general, how G2 was scrapped (except for security updates) in favor of Gallery v3, and how his G2 install (at the time of writing of his article) had over 200,000 items getting hammered with 200,000 hits an hour, and so forth including a rant about how his G2 code contribution being pulled off. I don't know if the guy is using his Dreamhost account for his G2 install, or some VPS/dedicated server - that could be contributing to his issues.

But what are your thoughts about what he had to say? I'd be interested to know from Bharat, Valiant, Mindless and past G2 contributors.

I know Joe7 runs a monstrous G2 install with plenty of custom tweaks not for the weak at heart.

Here's my honest take on the article and Gallery 2 & 3 in general...

I won't be migrating any of my G2 installs to G3 until its mature enough (performance, stability, etc..) and the upgrade path is well tested and proven to work, AND multisite is fully supported. The amount of G2 multisites I setup is about 15-20 every month - I have many users requesting G3 but I turned them down for the reasons I mentioned. I run a G3 install but still very sluggish.

If I ever won the lottery, I would hire 2-3 developers well versed in Gallery 2 to develop patches & code/speed enhancements (not features) for the benefit of 100,000s of satisfied G2 users out there. Though I'm not sure if the core devs will allow those patches to make it the repository, but if that's the case, most likely G2 will need to be forked. =)

my 2 cents.

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liberate your photos with Gallery, make the switch today!
http://pixi.me/

@suprsidr - I know you have several open-sourced G2 plugins under your belt. Now I know who to ask if I need a custom written G2 module like your Flash uploader & Cooliris interface for example to work in a multisite setup (cross domain issues?).

I have several ideas of my own, will definitely be in contact once I have the funds for it!

go for it let's read it! :D

Too bad vangel (?) did not bring some of the issues to the proper place where he got good support before.

Was G2 mature enough for you @G2.0? For most is was not.
We believe that the performance in G3 out paces G2 in most if not all respects.
Upgrade path: Was there a upgrade from G1 to G2? NO. It was a migration same with G2 to G3.
Does it work...well that is proven as bharat has converted his G2 to G3: http://www.menalto.com/gallery/ redirects to http://www.menalto.com/photos/
I feel your reluctance to go to G3 as I have yet to do it. But have tested it a few times. The only issue I have is; I have not got the redirects with WP quite right. No time to fix & I am no redirect/rewrite expert.

As for mulitsite, time till tell. Multisite came about because of the monstrous size of G2. G3 does not have that issue. G2 multisite came long after G2.0 as well.
Some might feel that G3 is not for them. We are fine with that and the community with suprsidr leading the way in G2 support, G2 will live-on.

As far as I know there has only been a few commits by mindless, another behind the scenes developer. His last commit was only 4 weeks ago:
http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gallery/trunk/gallery2/modules/core/po/bg.po?sortby=log&r1=20978&r2=20977&pathrev=20978
The beauty of open source is you can create your own fork if development is not continuing in the direction or the speed in witch you wish it to go.

Find a developer that is willing to take charge of G2 and you and the community can make it happen.

Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

I'd rather not start a flame war. If he does post in here. I'll post what I have written and smack his ass down. In short Dayo and Dave have made more intelligent comments than my nearly 1,200 word mostly rant.

Here's part of it replying to your comment and it's the constructive part of diatribe (some of which Dave has covered):

Features in G3, yeah, that's going to come with time. Performance, it's there. It's beating the pants of G2 on any server I've had it on. But if you are supporting a lot of stuff, I also certainly wouldn't look at upgrading just yet. Well I'd look and start investigating and testing, but probably would take my time in planning. Possibly providing G3 to new users, but I don't know what type of service you provide....

If G3 is sluggish on your site, hook up with Bharat either in the forums or in #gallery on IRC, there's probably something happening on the server, there's also a setting he's had a few people change on their sites that's made a big difference for them. I'd have to look for that in the forums. But it's most likely disk i/o.

As for someone maintaining G2. If someone wanted to roll with that ball I'm sure you'd have support. The core dev team just doesn't have the bandwidth to maintain it and G3 and G3 is a lot easier to work with and enhance. We've already got more modules and themes for G3 (before even it's initial release) than G2 had in it's first YEAR. For G2, while a fair number of community members contributed themes, few contributed modules and a lot of the time if they did, they (the developer) fell by the way side and it became the task of the dev team to keep them up to date. G3 is taking a different path.

<this may or may not be 100% true, but it's my take on it>
There will be the core product, all other themes and modules will be "3rd party" (whether developed by someone in the community or even a dev team member) and those will all be optional add ons having to be maintained by the author or community. I hate to compare it to Wordpress, but similar to that, lean and mean, low-impact install that have 100% of the functionality for 80% of the users and anything else is optional.
</this may or may not be 100% true, but it's my take on it>

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Vandal can step aside, that's fighting talk to a G2 fan.

Test Scenario 1
G2: 1 Background Image, 1 Standard Resize, 30 Thumbnails - Load Time 2.6s (Standard Resize loads up in 1.2s)
G3: 1 Standard Resize - Load Time 3.2s

Test Scenario 2
G2: 1 Background Image, 30 Square Thumbnails - Load Time 2.6s
G3: 9 Thumbnails (1 Thumbnail = approx 2 Square Thumbnails) - Load Time 3.4s

Both instances on the same server.

She has been called big, fat and ugly even by her developers and she has been spurned for the new little hot chick but there's life in the old lady yet and she knows tricks the svelte senorita can't even dream about.

She just needs some TLC and understanding as well as some, umm, slash and burn hacking of the code.

Yep, can't personally see any compelling reason to move to G3 at this point in time ... apart unfortunately, from abandonment and lack of support by the devs but rolled up my sleeves and starting learning up on it. For a new comer though, it is probably a different story.

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dakanji.com

My post was a response to your statement that introduced the comparative performance angle earlier in the thread.

I'll think this is as relevant to the post as that was and I then go to talk about the future for me which is what the thread is about.

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dakanji.com

I'll try to remember that as much as possible.

Well sometimes, after re-reading, somethings are better said in certain ways.

PS. You really should have sent a PM on that as it certainly isn't related to the thread topic.
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dakanji.com

Dayo,
Please use the 'preview' button when making replies to posts.

Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

@Dave & Wayne
I do use the preview button and sorry to for the frustrations caused by you receiving the notifications.
However perhaps you might also want to look into getting the notification system to work in a way where you receive one notification and nothing more until you visit the thread and frankly, it shouldn't be sending notifications for an edit in the first place anyway.

Besides, if someone posts a separate follow on post, you will have the same problem. I.E., it will be better to fix the problem at the source (the forum software).

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dakanji.com

Yo. I feel your pain, I get a crapload of notifications (and can see the entire stream of somebody's edits sometimes ). I'll look into it.
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Problems? Check gallery3/var/logs
bugs/feature req's | upgrade to the latest code | use git

Oops!

On the notifications, perhaps it might be worthwhile allowing people to opt into receiving notifications of edits of the first post in a thread. In this way, people can be kept up to date on long support threads when the OP goes in to add info to the first thread.

This will however probably mean that the "solved" notifications still get sent but I think it would not be such an issue if it is an opt in.

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dakanji.com

Yeah! problem fixed, Dayo - feel free to edit to your hearts content.

-s
FlashYourWeb and Your Gallery with The E2 XML Media Player for Gallery2

Oh wow. 12 is a tragically low number for MRPC. You might want to set it to something high instead of zero, though in case there are memory leaks in Apache2 or its extensions. Here on GMC I set it to 10000.
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Problems? Check gallery3/var/logs
bugs/feature req's | upgrade to the latest code | use git

Pixelpipe drops support for Gallery 2 and 3 - now that's a bummer. iGallery (app for Apple mobile devices) is going nowhere, and it looks like ReGalAndroid (open source) is pickup just nicely. I have no doubts remote clients for Gallery 3 will become more and more abundant.

I really hope someone steps up and develops an app for the Apple iPod/iPad/iPhone platform that speaks REST and Gallery Remote (both supporting G2 and G3) - even its payware, I'm sure many folks would be interested - and just share their ROI as donation to the project. I'll even pay for the $99/annual fee on the table for any takers? http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/

__________________________________________________________
liberate your photos with Gallery, make the switch today!
http://pixi.me/

I kept saying the same thing, but ofcourse who was listening. :/

Bharat

The link was a couple of months old when I posted it which in turn was about two months ago so I don't exactly remember what state my site was in then as I have been tinkering continually over the past year.

Basically, I had seen this YouTube Video from Google about cutting down latency and been hacking my G2 code to try to do this.

I found PageSpeed too intense so I went for YSlow and been working it until I managed to get an "A" grading on all my pages. I'll get round to taking it to the next level with PageSpeed at some point (trim down the Yahoo js file as most of it is not used etc).

As for your queries, I do use caching both within G2 and at the server level. I don't use a php opcode accelerator (I run php as cgi and not fastcgi so this is not possible anyway) but I do cache final html output using nginx so most requests are served directly without running any php at all. This drastically minimises my server load (running as plain cgi means php is only fired when specifically needed) and works well for me as the site does not change very often.

Also, you gave me some tips a while back on IRC which I used to bypass the image firewall. I actually wrote a module, which with some hacks, achieves this but due to some security concerns, I decided to pull it from general distribution. These were discussed with Valiant and he reckoned they were not particularly serious and fixing them could wait until whenever you guys can come up for some air on G3 ... probably sometime in 2020.

He is right that the vast majority G2 installs would not be vulnerable but as an aside, my Linode got breached through another php app on a similar vulnerability shortly after. Luckily caught it soon after the event (the exploit payload was in PHP 5.2 while I had upgraded to 5.3 and it started filling my logs with unexpected "deprecated" errors). More importantly, it was a responsible criminal that broke in (needed my server working as normal) rather than a teenage vandal.

Anyway, my site today has the following:

• Improved the Combined Javascript code to reduce the number of files produced. Existing code was not as efficient as could be
• Added minification code to TemplateAdapter.class to minify the js.
• Moved Javascript link out of g->head function to the top of the g->trailer function so that page starts rendering quicker and the browser can download stuff in parallel.
• Used files in Items 1 & 2 above to create minified combined CSS version
• Bypassed Image firewall.
• Leveraged this bypass to use GoogleAppEngine. I see there is a Amazon S3 module for G3 that aims for the same goal except that GoogleApps are free for low intensity use (<5m views/mo). Disadvantage is that I have not yet automated the process (Needs Java or Python knowledge) and manage it manually.
• Use Jpegtran to reduce derivative image size. YSlow has SmushIT ... turns out it is just Jpegtran in action. If you run YSlow on my site and run SmushIT on the images, it will always come back with a "No Savings" message. Currently manually doing this optimisation from the command line and will look into writing it into the Jpegtran module to be fired on upload at some point.
• Multiple parallel servers (whether AppEngine or local - I have a switch in DerivativeImage.Class for when I can't be bothered to upload to GoogleApps). So images are from multiple GoogleApps or subdomains plus my main domain. About three in total seems to be a sweet spot before latency from DNS lookups start to become a potential issue.
• G2 Cache is switched on.
• Images around viewed images are preloaded in the background. I know this one wasn't active when the test was done as it would have actually returned a slower time in such a test.
• Nginx caching (can be done with Apache too using Mod Cache)

.

All in all, some of the stuff probably not suitable for the G3 target audience on a shared server but I reckoned that since I can get my server load down to a minimum and also get ~ 2 second load speeds, I'll rather stick with the power of G2 for now at least especially since it had taken years to set up and understand it. Also now that I am starting to understand the embed feature, I can see just how flexible and powerful it is.

To be honest though, I was surprised at the results I got as I just did it as a benchmark feeling I'll need to activate the Matrix Theme for a proper comparison. Thinking back since my post, I think I may have had the GoogleApps active then which would have skewed the results.

BTW, 8 Secs+ just to start rendering a page!! That is simply horrendous ... looks like there is a ton of latency to be slashed there.
Even the G3 page can do with some help as 8 Secs to complete rendering is not so good. Perhaps they are running off this same server which must have quite a bit of traffic. Time to look at Nginx?

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dakanji.com

Security updates, Yes, but with over few years of no security issues we doubt that any more will be found since we has a 3rd party security company investigate the software at major milestones.

Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

Where'd you see that "alert"?
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is not "update now or die". In G2s infancy there was a few times we 'strongly recommended' you upgrade as well.

Your welcome to stick with G2 as it is still secure and supported by the community.
I will not put much effort into helping people who quote things that can't even be quoted?

Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team