PHP Help

[Arct1k]

Why not browse dir using explorer?

[BrianG]

Originally Posted by kraegar

...For the thumbnails not showing up until you mouse-over, that's HTML, not PHP that's biting you. Or really, Javascript. The "onmouseover" part needs to go. I don't know javascript to tell you how to replace it, though.

As for why it's stopping part way through, I can't see a reason. Is it always in the same spot?

Sorry I can't dig in more, I'm working atm :)
Tony

The onmouseover event is there because I can't get the auto-thumbnail generation to work consistently on the server. Therefore, any "thumbnails" would be simply resized images, but their file size (and therefore download time) time would not change. Showing the image only on mouseover means the page doesn't have to download images that I don't care about until I get to the image I want to see. Just a speed optimization really.

Originally Posted by kraegar

Oh, and you can definitely just put the sort($a_img) after the loop. There's no reason for it to be in the loop.

I put the sort code outside the loop, but it didn't do anything to help the speed, well, not noticeably anyway. I'm sure there is some time savings, but it's probably measured in milli-seconds.

When I took a closer look, I see that the PHP that writes the file count to the page happens after the looping, but that part is displayed right away. I can then assume that the loop and sort is not the cause of the delay or the image count at the top would be delayed as well.

So, I looked at the loop which writes the HTML to the page instead. In client-side JScript, many multiple calls to the document.write() method (which is similar to the PHP echo method) tends to be very slow. In Jscript, an easy way to speed document writing is to create a string variable, concatenate the string in the loop (creates a very large string), and then use one "document.write()" call to write that whole string to the page at once. So, I used this methodology in PHP and it seems to have speeded up things by a factor of at least 5.

There is a disadvantage to doing this though. When you use multiple write calls (document.write() in jscript, or echo in php) you see each line appear as the server writes it to the page. If you use the concatenate scheme, it IS much faster, but you only see the full page content when all the text is compiled. Not a big deal in this specific page since there are relatively few lines to work with, but if the page is huge, you'd see a blank page until the server was done processing. A way to combine the best of both worlds would be to use the concatenate scheme to compile all the text in each iteration of the loop, and just use one echo call at the end of that iteration.

Originally Posted by Arct1k

Why not browse dir using explorer?

That won't work because I shut off directory browsing on my server (for valid reasons). I could also use FTP via Explorer, but then I'd have to remember my FTP login/password wherever I happened to be, and the account info is somewhat cryptic and difficult to remember. Either way, those would just show the file names, not the image associated with them.