Here are some tips to get the best performance from your Coppermine gallery. It covers changes you can make to both Coppermine's configuration and your server configuration (if you have access to that of course).
Many of the configuration options have performance implications. Some features can cause load issues when used on large galleries or galleries that are structured in an unusual way. The general advice is to disable any feature you don't actually make use of and to keep any numeric options sane.
Things that increase server load generally
Things that can cause load spikes on specific pages. If you are on a shared server you should avoid creating load spikes.
There are some settings that are not directly related to coppermine, but to the webserver. If you're webhosted, you usually can't manipulate them. Changing your server setup goes unsupported on the coppermine support board. However, it's recommended to look into those settings as well - maybe your webhost can change things for you.
If you have control over your server you can improve Coppermine's performance by adjusting your PHP configuration.
If you have control over your server you can improve Coppermine's performance by adjusting your MySQL configuration.
There is a number of third party tools that can help you to improve the performance of your gallery. Please note that the coppermine group is not affiliated with any of those tools nor do we support those tools.
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
By adding an .htaccess file containing the following code into your Coppermine gallery directory you can apply some of these suggestions. If you do not use Apache as your webserver you will need to find the corresponding configuration settings for your webserver of choice. If your site no longer works after making these changes you can simply rename or delete the .htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive on ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 weeks" ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds" </IfModule>
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript text/javascript text/css text/html text/xml </IfModule>Coppermine doesn't work very well with output compression, as it was not built with that in mind: it jumps in and out of output buffering quite frequently, that's why it probably doesn't work very well with output compression.
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