Apologies for any performance problems with tieguy.org this morning- for some reason my gallery is getting pounded and it is bringing the whole machine to its knees. I really wish the gallery guys would focus on performance for their next release- the current situation is just abysmal :/
[Coincidentally, last night I swapped out the old planet install for venus, which helped performance a huge amount. The server would be completely hosed right now if I hadn’t done that.]
[Later: holy cow. If you’re running gallery, and don’t do much dynamic except show hit counts, run, don’t walk, to site admin> performance> guest users and jam ‘full acceleration’. My load went from 5.0 to 0.1 almost immediately. ]
“for some reason my gallery is getting pounded and it is bringing the whole machine to its knees”
The reason would be that you linked directly to a Gallery image on your site, which meant that everyone who looked at Planet Gnome and everyone who read your RSS feed or the p.g.o RSS feed was loading the image…
I do that all the time, though, usually with no (well, less) ill effects. It serves static images pretty quickly- it is the dynamic page built around the image that is a killer (hence the optimization mentioned having such a big effect.)