If you are experiencing performance issues with Ark Media or you would like to tweak a few settings to give it that extra boost check out the following tips.

Use just one file view

By default the Media Manager has three file views, using just one file view will help to reduce the memory load.

To configure the Media Manager to have just one file view:

1. Go to Components / Ark Media and click on the Options button.

2. Select the Interface tab and navigate to Enabled Views.

3. Deselect the two views that you do not wish to use and save.

Reducing the number of enabled views available will drastically reduce the burden on the browser to render out all of the file information. So if you only ever use the grid or list view for example you won't even notice the difference by switching the other 2 views off.

Disable Thumbnails

If the issue persists when using only one file view, you could try disabling thumbnails. Switching off thumbnail loading will also improve the load burden on the browser. This will set all images to load their file type icon rather than a thumbnail preview of the file. This is useful for folders containing large images (dimensions and filesize).

1. To do this, again go to Components / Ark Media and click on the Options button.
2. Under the Interface tab, set Enable Thumbnails to No and save.

Enable caching

By ensuring caching is enabled you will still experience the initial 'hit' of the page load, however, subsequent loads will be drastically reduced because the information will have been cached by the system rather than requested afresh each time. Both Joomla & Ark Media have caching systems. To check Ark Media's go to:

1. Components / Ark Media and click on the Options button.
2. Go to the System tab and scroll to the Enable System Caching and ensure this parameter is enabled.

Plugins

If your situation is really dire you can disable some of Ark Media's lesser used plugins to also improve performance.

• If you only use Ark Media for image management then you can use Joomla's plugin manager to disable Ark Media's Audios, Videos & Documents plugins without any adverse effect or loss of functionality. Note: This assumes you want an Image only manager!
• A couple of other features can be switched off for a performance improvement as well if you don't need/use: Image editing or Search. These 2 plugins can also be safely disabled.
• Disabling any of the remaining plugins will not have a noticeable effect on performance.

Revise filesystem

If you find you are needing to explore the last plugin tweak suggestion then we really would advise a rethink on how your filesystem is organised and distributed! For example, if you have one folder with hundreds of files this will place a burden on the browser regardless of how many settings you tweak. In this scenario we would suggest distributing your images into sub folders. This means you only need to load the fileset that is relevant to your current need. This will also make your filesystem more organised, easier to manage and navigate, so win win all round!

Hopfully some of those points help. We have focused heavily on performance over the last year and will continue to do so for our next releases so this point will always be on our roadmap!

Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance related queries we haven't covered in this documentation.