Ah, the joys of self-hosting
...
Just for clarification: what makes the server slow down during batch-add is the fact that you (ab-)use your server to resize the pics. Setting up another server on the more powerful machine and then moving resized pics back and synchronizing the databases of the two servers is just a waste of time. Batch-resize the pics on your client (the more powerful machine), then upload the whole enchilada to the server and perform the batch-add script: if the resized pics already exist, the resources-consuming resizing on the server doesn't have to be performed and only the (light-weight) database operations will be run. Subsequently, you'll notice no lag or performance penalty of the server during batch-add.
As an example: if you have set your max dimension to 1024, use a tool like IrfanView to batch-resize all your pics that you're going to upload to resize them to a max aspect of 1024. Then re-run IrfanView's batch-resize tool this time with the dimension of your intermediate-sized images setting and the option turned on to batch-rename as well: just change the names of those files in the second round of resizing, matching the name to be prefixed with your intermediate images (default: "normal_"). Then perform the batch-resize and batch-rename a third time with the max dimensions of your thumbs and the prefix you chose for thumbs (default: "thumb_"). After having created those three sets of files, move them to your server and finally perform batch-add there. Details can be found on
http://coppermine-gallery.net/tutorial/irfanview1.phpAnother workaround would be to use the
Batch add with automatic album/cat structure from directory tree.-mod and only add a few pics in one go.