DB Probllem caused by NextGen Gallery-Took our Server Down

Well, a couple of months ago a decided to finally leave my older version of NextGen Gallery and upgrade to the latest version because I felt it was finally fixed.

My mistake…my sites have continued to slow down on the page loads and my host decided to move our sites over to a newer and faster server with a better CPU.

When they did I noticed we started to get a Database Connection error and they reported spikes were hitting their server from my site. One in particular that contains a load of images and files.

For days the site was either down, my account was suspended because of the load on their server and finally we discovered what was causing this problem…NextGen Gallery 3.9.1

From our support team:

Hello Len,

On monitoring the server we could see that huge load spike on the server, and it is created by the account impress1 . Currently we are working on this server.

We will check the various statistics files and will run maldet scan on the account. and, will update you shortly with the sufficient details.

Here is information that might help others that are having the same problem.

The issue looks like it’s wordpress & the NextGen Gallery which is creation MILLIONS of rows in the wp-options table in your MySQL database

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp_options-to-many-records

Len do you need NextGen Gallery? If not I would remove it run this SQL string in the DB to clean up that database.

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name like ‘_transient_%’ OR option_name like ‘displayed_galleries%’

So after checking everything on our two sites, from traffic from bots to just about every plugin, the conclusion was NextGen Gallery has totally taken our sites down.

Here is the final solution:

Hi Len,

As mentioned on the Ticket ID: 40030, we have made some modifications on the database of the user impress1 and were monitoring the server till now. We could not find any load spike on the server after the modifications.

Please see the current load details :

——–
root@server1 [~]# w
03:24:50 up 9 days, 4:00, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.22, 0.31
——–

Now of course I have a mess to clean up. All of my images being fed from the NextGen Gallery are no longer visible on our sites and I am not sure the best way to restore them if I even can.

Is there any way to capture these images? I assume the must reside in a directory on our server. I would then have to upload them via the Media Library and store them there.

Has anyone else observed this issue?

Would reverting back to the older version before you guys took over this plug-in help in any way? I am a bit lost and disappointed to say the least.

Put my faith in your company and for months since I upgraded have been suffering and spending weeks trying to figure out what was wrong.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/