phpThumb is killing my server. Help

[zerillos]

I'm using phpThumb to generate thumbnails. it worked grate for 4 years since a few days ago when it started to kill my server.

the server load goes through the roof.

i didn't make any changes to the script or to anything on the site, and the traffic did not get higher. however, over night phpThumb is using almost all my CPU

the cache in phpThumb is working

please help. I'm getting desperate.

anyone else enountered this problem?

[Anyango]

is any process stuck ? did you restart your server? is there a huge image to create a thumbnail of ? that might be causing the script to hang

[zerillos]

no process stuck. i did restart the server and the problem continued and no large image

[enigma1]

I remember that class it keeps a cache of images and no auto-cleanup if I remember correctly. You will have to clean up the thumbs manually (there should be a cache folder under phpThumb). What I don't understand though is that the thumb files must be accessed for the server load you describe.

If some traffic is causing it you may want to implement cold image linking where the images are outside the web-root and an intermediate server script accesses them and randomizes the image link so images cannot hot-linked.

[zerillos]

the cache cleans out ok.
what i dont understand is this:
if it has worked for 4 years without trouble
i haven't changed anything in my site's code
i haven't changed anything at phpthumb
the traffic is the same

why is it causing such high server load?

i think it might be a php setting of some sort...maybe the people at my hoting server changed something (it's a deducated server)

[enigma1]

Can you check the dates of the thumbs? Are they recreated on every request for some reason?

[zerillos]

nope. i'm almost certain the cache works fine.
i'm wondering if it could be a server or php setting of some sort
can you think of anything of this type?

[enigma1]

make a test php script on the server do

echo get_cfg_var('memory_limit');

what's the memory limit?

[zerillos]

solved it...it was not phpthumb. it was imagemagick and the problem was i had two versions installed on my server