When visiting an album for the first time the initial cache of the image is slow (+8 seconds), the image will load very quickly on subsequent loads. I have already done most of the speed tips posted here http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/06/performance-hacks/ and will pre-cache images from the admin menus, this helps but I can be around to do this all the time. The pics are larger 4700x3100 px on average. I am running the most recent version of WAMP (Apache 2x, PHP 5.2x) on server 2003, Xeon 3ghz, 1gb ram with a small load. My questions are;

1. Is this type of performace expected?

2. What can I do to make it faster?

Thanks,
Joe

1. Zenphoto generates the sized images like thumbnails on the fly and when they are request. It does that onces thus the speedy display on the 2nd visit.

4700x3100 are quite large images so your server has quite some work to do. I would guess that your sever does not provide 1gb ram for php to process the images. So yes, this is basically expected, especially if several images like on thumbnail pages have to be processed.

2. Get a faster server or upload smaller images...;-)

Please also read the troubleshooting guide about this.