i have integrated the photogallery with wordpress and the site loads very slow. i have a dedicated server with dual xeon and 2 gb ram.

still its slow

You probably did not precache your images, so they are generated while visiting the site. That can be a little slow, especially if the uploaded images are a little bigger. Please see here: http://www.zenphoto.org/2007/12/troubleshooting-zenphoto/

Zenphoto integrations with wordpress are going to be slow for a good reason - every single page load, zenphoto has to load Wordpress' entire program, and then its own program logic. I don't mean to knock Wordpress, but it barely slides by on its own, so compounding its load time with Zenphoto's load time is even less bearable. I am willing to bet that most of the page load time is Wordpress' part (since I know Zenphoto page loads are usually below 0.05 seconds on average).

Especially having a very dynamic UI (lots of page loads while browsing images, etc.) a photo gallery like Zenphoto has to be fast, and loading Wordpress on each page just doesn't sit well with that.

I do not understand the obsession my colleagues have with pre-caching ;-) The image generation only happens once, photos will be generated as needed. Especially on a fast server like yours you'd hardly notice the difference. But you can try that too.

Okay, finally my main recommendation. Integrating Wordpress and Zenphoto is not usually a good idea, for all the reasons above. It's pretty easy to take a Wordpress theme or original design and "port" it to a Zenphoto theme. Zenphoto themes are very simple, you can look at the existing ones to see where to put the code blocks and other than that it's just HTML and CSS as usual. A pure zenphoto theme would be tens of times faster than loading it within wordpress.

Good luck, just thought I'd explain that more clearly.

What can I do if my php includes do NOT have images? In my zen install I have 2 includes: A menu bar and a banner code. They are separate because I also included them in other areas of the website, a wordpress blog, a forum and some static pages. They all load pretty fast also with the php includes, but for some reason zen slows down ALOT. Obviously I could easily put the code inside zen without needing to include, but this way everytime i need to make a change (for example adding a menu element or changing the banner code) I would have to manually modify them in each of zen template files.

is there a simple way of making zen load the includes faster as wordpress does?

thank you

Simon

Could you provide a link so that we can take a look?

sure:

http://pigmag.com/zen/

(it's a dummy/test install)

thank you

but the main wordpress page loads very fast. is there any option to make it really fast

zimen74: We had no complains about that before. I had only time for a quick look at your site and it looks as if the stats javascripts could be a cause of slowing it down a bit (ads can too sometimes, I guess everything from outside servers can).

We use zenphoto with wordpress on our site, too, and it's not slower than the pure Wordpress parts, I think. I am sorry that I can't help more with this. Maybe someone of the others has any idea.