Inomplete listing poll.

[Lhotch]

Ive been working on a script to sync ads on a 68c site with live rss feeds from other sources and in doing so I ran into some interesting obstacles to say the last.

One of them I think ties directly into images and I think may be a root cause of incomplete ads.

With that in mind, for those of you that allow images in your ads, do you find that the majority of your imcomplete ads are those that allow images, text only ads or a pretty equal amount?

[CHRD]

Yes Iv lost loads of money due to the image add problem, it dosnt matter what I set the file to in the admin side, the site white out if people try to add images over 500kb.

I have to email or call them to get the business back

[Lhotch]

What is happening isnt entirely the ault of 68c but instead how much memory you host has allowed your scripts to use.

In order for the php image libraries to process an image file the file needs to be uncompressed. Due to jpg compression algorythms you can have 2 files with the exact same image dimensions in pixels yet they can be very different sizes on disk depending on the quality they are saved at, the higher the quality the less compression and in turn a larger file size.

For example lets say we have an image that is 2500 pixels wide and 2500 pixels high. Saved at a quality of 100 it gives us a file size of 2.5mg but saves at 50% quality is 1.5mg.

Now lets also assume your server has an upload limit size of 2mg and in 68c admin you have max upload size set to 2000kb (approx 2mg). The Larger file above would get rejected due to file size, but the more compressed image would not

BUT

The clincher is, in terms of system memory when they are uncompressed both files are physically 2500x2500 pixels and thus use the same amount of memory. If all alloted memory is eaten up during the image upload you end up with a blank page.

The work around for this is to open usercheckout.php and look for the following 2 lines......

$ppu->maxWidth = "";
$ppu->maxHeight = "";

What you will need to do is place some pixel values into those fields to limit the dimensionalsize of the source image so the script does not run out of memory.

Just what to make these valus really varies based on how much mem your host allows. On a server with a low load and a 16m mem size limit you can probably use 1000. If that doesnt work you will have to try smaller values. using 1000 as an example the above two lines should look like this..

$ppu->maxWidth = "1000";
$ppu->maxHeight = "1000";

This ill caus ethe image class to check the source file before processing it and should return an error if the source image is above these dimensions.

If the source file is not above these dimensions and you get a blank screen during ad placement then the values are too high and the script is running out of memory. You will need to keep trying smaller values and placing test ads until you end up with dimensions that you know will work.