sdm networks weblog

Today I played a bit with my fotoalbum. I learned that I made a whole lot of database queries which are not necessary at all. So I began making optimisations to improve performance.

After adding a query counter and looking at some queries and code I found out how to improve the behaviour given. The thing that created most of the queries (>60%) was the recursive function isPublished(). But this function is needed to successfully tell if an image is published or not. So what to do? Use caching!

The cache did a good job, but could not reduce the number of queries the way I wanted it to be. So I tried harder on optimising queries, loops and object creation.

Finally I could gain a reduction of about 93% of the queries made when it was not optimised at all. This is great, you know, because an image gallery should not eat that much server performance.

Well, go to my installation of fotoalbum if you’d like to see it in action. If you like it, then you can also get a copy of it! If something fails then please report it to the fotoalbum page so I can help you or at least fix the problem.