is there a way to cache an album page so that SQL queries are not made when going to an album page which hasn't been updated ? Yesterday my site got slashdotted a bit and my MySQL process sent the server in eternal swap with io quotas.

Ideas ?

First suggestion - use the SVN, it's got a query cache in it that reduces the number of queries significantly, that'll help a lot.

Caching the actual HTML would be a bit of work, but definitely possible -- if you want you can even just set it on a time limit so the cached page is only refreshed say if it's more than 2 hours old and not even worry about whether the albums have been updated, etc. Of course you'd want to give yourself the ability to manually refresh it, but that's not too hard either.

I do this with a bit of code I put on the front page of my blog (the album art in the sidebar) and it wasn't too hard. Let me know if you need any help.

Great suggestions. Is the SVN solid enough to deploy right now ? Are you getting close to a release. I seem to think that it contains EXIF stuff too that I'd love to play with.

As far as I can tell it is stable enough. I haven't had any trouble using it, and it's on my production zenphoto site (http://www.bushwoodworking.com/zenphoto). I have the EXIF display working there too using the SVN exif functions.

The test album on the front page has an image with no EXIF tags in it for demo of the EXIF function and what it displays when no tags are present.