what does [Limit reached] on images mean?

[bvanevery]

Starting last night, when I made posts to my After Action Report, the uploaded images often wouldn't be displayed.  Instead some text appears that says [Limit reached].  If I refreshed the page sometime later, these messages would often go away, and the images would display.  But now this afternoon, they do not, and less is being displayed than was last night.

So, what limit has been reached?  Album entries?  Images per thread?  Images per post?  Some Firefox dependent limit?  Limit of the server side CPU's patience?

[Buster's Uncle]

Huh.  I wondered what that was about.

Paging Draz.  Weird tech problem in progress...

[Buster's Uncle]

...I've come up against something like this before with posting YouTube videos - it cuts off at 10 to a page, and I'd have to spam five posts to get it to roll over to a new page.  This appears to be time-based.  I'd recommend img-linking the bottom link line in the album page when you get this...

[bvanevery]

Yeah, web page 12 of my AAR is kinda fried in the last 3rd, due to this problem.  Due to my natural verbosity, I had a page 13 not that long ago, and it displays images just fine.  So [Limit reached] is about images per webpage.

The problem is, my AAR has a certain chronological structure.  Physically moving page content around, until things get better, is pretty tacky.  Not impossible though.

I just manually counted all my images on page 12.  There are 100 actually displayed.  So, that's the limit.

Is it possible for that limit to be raised?  It would save me a lot of work.  Like double it.  I have 160 images on that page in total.

I'm wondering why I never previously encountered this.  I've certainly done a lot of AARs with screenshots.  I'll have to look at the previous pages to see what's up with that.

Page 11 and page 12 both have 15 posts on them, regardless of number of images.

[bvanevery]

The difficulty happened because a lot happened in my game.  I've usually had the habit of "1 post equals 1 year".  Well if tons of things happen in a year, you have tons of screenshots.  This increases the images per post density.  You only get 15 posts per webpage, and if they are very dense with images, it's possible to blow the 100 images per webpage limit.  I haven't run into this difficulty before, because for some reason in all my previous AARs, I didn't have enough "big turns" in a single window of 15 posts.

I have solved the problem by a tedious process I call "inchworming".  Basically I manually cut and pasted the content of my pages, to recycle the pages.  I managed to do this by working from earliest page first, thereby preserving a chronological order of timestamps.  They don't match the original posting dates, but at least everything is in a chronological sequence.  By this "inchworming" process, I managed to move 7 posts and a lot of images to the next webpage.

Now that I'm aware of this forum limitation, I'm less likely to run into the problem again.  Basically the thing to do is to "break things up more" and not get into long runs about 1 turn.  This would usually result in a workable distribution of images over web pages.

If I nevertheless run into this difficulty again, at some point in the future, I will raise the question of whether the image limit can be raised.  It could be some setting in a configuration file somewhere, as opposed to hard coded value or serious implementation limit.

I don't know what impact doubling the number of images would have on server performance, but I expect none.  I'm probably the only person generating enough content, that there would ever be 100 to 200 images per web page.  And I've only done it once, in a rather large body of AAR work.  I don't think the audience for such work is all that large, and people read through a page, and go on to the next one.  I'm just not seeing where a doubling of images, would realistically hang anything.

Unless of course a doubling of images, exposes an obscure bug in the implementation, that sends the server crashing into oblivion.     So if this is ever undertaken, it might be wise to ask other people who run these servers, whether image limit is really any kind of problem to raise.  Getting a straight answer might be difficult though, because this forum isn't using the most current version of the software.  As I write this, it says SMF 2.0.13 at the bottom of the page.

For now though, nothing needs to be done.  And perhaps not ever.

[bvanevery]

Ok, I spoke too soon.  I'm seeing all kinds of weird behavior on my page 12.  Sometimes it looks like there's 8 images that won't display.  Other times there's tons more than that, despite all the editing and reshuffling I did earlier today.  Meanwhile, I did lots of additional posts on my page 13 before noticing any of this.  It's simply not feasible for me to "inchworm" this stuff all over again.  Not to mention that it seems like last time, it didn't exactly work.

I have to at least ask, what's the underlying technical problem here?  And is raising that Limit, a solution?  Or is this just bugged?

I count 137 images on page 12 now.  I could swear they were all appearing properly at some point in my editing, which led me to believe I had 100.  There must have been something about my "inchworm" editing process that fooled me, with all the cutting and pasting.

How 'bout raising the limit to 150?

[Buster's Uncle]

If I knew of a limit that could be raised, I'd have fiddled it up seven years ago.

[bvanevery]

I started looking at the Simple Machines documentation.  A setting does not immediately leap out anywhere.  The Search function and FAQ were not helpful.  That of course won't be the end of my digging.  Worst case I search the source code for the "Limit reached" message.

I had a weird phenomenon on page 12 when I inserted the following "marker message" into one of the posts:

[98 images have been displayed on page 12 prior to this point.  Anything after this, pretty much has to go on page 13.]

Suddenly, everything on page 12 displayed properly.  I wonder if editing a page, temporarily ups the limit?  That might explain how I got fooled during my "inchworming" process.  I don't expect this boon to last.  Previously I've seen the number of viewable images diminish, first with 8 unviewable, then 37.  Maybe that has to do with some internal implementation of the server, like buffering or garbage collecting or who knows.

On the other hand... it would be remarkable if the server implemented a semi-adaptable database.  Raising the number of images allowed to be displayed, according to some internal metric of actual demand.  Like enough "Limit reached" messages and suddenly everything starts displaying ok?  I think I will refrain from editing heroics until at least tomorrow.

[bvanevery]

As predicted, the displayability of images after my editing, did not last.

I searched their forum for some time.  I perused the source code, although not absolutely thoroughly with a multi-directory search function.  I gained a rather limited understanding of how someone might write forum software in PHP.  One of the things that struck me, is it's stacked on several underlying component libraries.  [Limit reached] doesn't strictly have to come from the Simple Machines PHP software layer.

In any event, I didn't find a magic setting.  It could exist, but it takes work to find it.

It seemed more expedient to bite the bullet and do another massive "inchworming" of my AAR.  I think I've got it broken up properly now.

In the future, the rule of thumb is I need to average 6 images per post, or less.  15 posts per web page * 6 images = 90 images per web page.  Gives a small margin of error.