DISK /IO consumption due to GK4? Is it possible?

We were recently notified by our host of high disk i/o usage that impacts others on the VPS. We found after several days of diagnostics that the cause was coming from or related to running GK4 modules of this template on the front page, which causes heavy i/o use on the db creating tmp files over and over again. Once we disable this module the disk i/o problem goes away. Does anyone have any suggestions? Or has anyone heard of this issue before?

Thanks.

Hi

Noone else has reported it before, but I believe without cache on site and with multiple visits it's possible with any article displaying module. Please try using jotCache. This extention creates a HTML of a whole page, so a database connection is done only once for a while and saves disc usage.

Hi

Noone else has reported it before, but I believe without cache on site and with multiple visits it's possible with any article displaying module. Please try using jotCache. This extention creates a HTML of a whole page, so a database connection is done only once for a while and saves disc usage.

Thank you for quick reply! We are familiar with Jotcache and had it installed already. We have now turned off all cache but had the cache running before when I/O errors starting happening. As soon as we disabled GK4 on front page of this template it stopped. With or without cache. In our search on the web, we have found this issue shows up on many sites that have sliders running on home page. Many were GK4 but there were many that were not GK4, and they were using a slider module of some sort. We have GK4 still running in other sections of website working fine no issues. But the ones on front page kill our I/O usage.

We tried replacing GK4 on front page with GK5 but that crashed the whole site so we unpublished it. If you have anymore ideas we would appreciate it.
Thank you again.

Hi

So problem is News Show Pro or Image Show module ? Or both ? Sorry, I cannot understand.

Anyway if this is the cause, even if jotCache is used than the only option is a javascript engine. Please show me Your site so I'll see what is used exactly.

Hi

So problem is News Show Pro or Image Show module ? Or both ? Sorry, I cannot understand.

Anyway if this is the cause, even if jotCache is used than the only option is a javascript engine. Please show me Your site so I'll see what is used exactly.

The problem seems to be News Show Pro GK4. We had to turn it off the front page. We also now turned off all system cache so we can keep testing and fixing. You can see the GK4 working great here: http://bit.ly/1c3zEE7
But GK4 will not work on Front page because it cause high Disk I/O errors and creates hundreds of tmp files in MYSQL.

Thank you.

Hi

So problem is News Show Pro or Image Show module ? Or both ? Sorry, I cannot understand.

Anyway if this is the cause, even if jotCache is used than the only option is a javascript engine. Please show me Your site so I'll see what is used exactly.

The problem seems to be News Show Pro GK4. We had to turn it off the front page. We also now turned off all system cache so we can keep testing and fixing. You can see the GK4 working great here: http://bit.ly/1c3zEE7
But GK4 will not work on Front page because it cause high Disk I/O errors and creates hundreds of tmp files in MYSQL.

Thank you.

Oh yes wait, we do have it on the front page. What I mean is if we turn on animation/sliders in News Show Pro GK4 on front page in TOP 1 or TOP2 or TOP3 position that is when the DISK I/O goes very high. I hope that helps you understand. We removed GK4 in those positions for now. But we want to go back to GK4 if possible.

Hi

I've checked the code of NSP GK4 and there is not even one request for temp table to database. Are You sure it's not some server additional option to transform module queries to such ? I'll ask our main programmer to join conversation. Hopefully He will know something more about it.

Hi

I've checked the code of NSP GK4 and there is not even one request for temp table to database. Are You sure it's not some server additional option to transform module queries to such ? I'll ask our main programmer to join conversation. Hopefully He will know something more about it.

Great thank you! We are sure it is not the server or DB.

Hi

All programmers are still busy, but I'll be trying. Will let You know as soon as I learn something.

Hi

All programmers are still busy, but I'll be trying. Will let You know as soon as I learn something.

OK Thanks.

Hi

Sorry it took so long, we were changing a system to comunicate with programmers and I accidently ask question in the old one which was not used anymore. Got an answer to Your question:

User should check if the cache for images is set to high value i.e. 60-120 minutes, because if the cache is set to 0, then it will regenerate all thumbnails on each website request.

Hi

Sorry it took so long, we were changing a system to comunicate with programmers and I accidently ask question in the old one which was not used anymore. Got an answer to Your question:

User should check if the cache for images is set to high value i.e. 60-120 minutes, because if the cache is set to 0, then it will regenerate all thumbnails on each website request.

Hi thanks for the reply. Yes we have the cache set for 60 minutes. And we are still having the issue.

regards

Hi

One other programmer suggesed that with the amount of NSP modules it can be caussed by a big number of queries to database. I'll ask Him to join this conversation, so maybe He will be able to help with reducing it.

Hi

One other programmer suggesed that with the amount of NSP modules it can be caussed by a big number of queries to database. I'll ask Him to join this conversation, so maybe He will be able to help with reducing it.

Yes we could use some suggestions. Thank You!

Hi

Programmers cannot reproduce such issue and they tried on our demo where there is a lot of entries par day. Please send me an access to ftp. I think I have an access to Your joomla panel from earlier question.

Hi

Please make sure cache is enabled in all NSP modules and set to 60min. Than please check the disc usage. I hope this test will reveal something.

Hi

Please make sure cache is enabled in all NSP modules and set to 60min. Than please check the disc usage. I hope this test will reveal something.

Ok all modules are now set to 60. The tmp files creation is reduced now but still spikes on front page. only now.

Thanks

Hi

Ok. But at least there is an information that it's related/ Try set time of cache different in every module by about 10-15 min. This way files will not be created at the same time for all modules and problem should be solved

Hi

Ok. But at least there is an information that it's related/ Try set time of cache different in every module by about 10-15 min. This way files will not be created at the same time for all modules and problem should be solved

No still there. I tried your suggestion but it still happens.
Thank you!

Hi

But it doesn't make any sense ;/ Please just for test disable creating thumbnails and also disable showing images at all. I want to confirm that problem is happening when thumbs are created.

Please check also if GD library has the latest version. That's all I can think of right now

Is there any way I can have an access to this test so I can play with settings and check it myself ?

Hi

But it doesn't make any sense ;/ Please just for test disable creating thumbnails and also disable showing images at all. I want to confirm that problem is happening when thumbs are created.

Please check also if GD library has the latest version. That's all I can think of right now

Is there any way I can have an access to this test so I can play with settings and check it myself ?

When we disable thumb creation the problem stops. However, now that we have increased cache time, it seems to be much better.

The GD library is up to date. The version of GD in use now is 2.3.11.

Sorry we cannot provide root access to host at this time. It is the only way I know of of monitoring Disk I/O processes for mySql. We can check the processes from root as we load the pages and can see the tmp files being created. On pages where we do not use GK4 there is no problems.

We also found that our assets table for the DB was broken and so we corrected all assets and the Disk I/O issue is much better and not so frequent. We suspect we may also have a conflict with BT Content slider, when used on same page as GK4.

Thank you!

Hi

Ok great to hear it. Unfortunately not using files compression may slow the load time of the site, but if it's the cause of the problem than I think it's better to leave it like that and enable jotCache which will optimise this images on it's own and lower the time in other places of website.

Hi

Ok great to hear it. Unfortunately not using files compression may slow the load time of the site, but if it's the cause of the problem than I think it's better to leave it like that and enable jotCache which will optimise this images on it's own and lower the time in other places of website.

Are you recommending I use jotCache? If so, can you help with settings of jotCache for this template running Joomla 2.5? Do I turn off gkCache and system cache?

Thanks!

Hi

Yes. I found jotCache to be te best cache extention. Disable joomla or template cache if You want to use it and exclude module positions which are containing advertisements. A dissadventage is that new articles are not visible after publish, but after rebuilding cache, but it gives best results on site performance.