Michiel Bijland

Annoying things can make you work.

September 8th, 2006

Last 2 weeks I noticed my Weekly backups I make from my sites started to grow rapidly. I mean with more the 10MB a week and not from the sites I expected. So investigation was in order. I found out that Gallery 2 was hording cache data into the database like mad man. The cache works great and speed bump was very good so I though this was the price to pay. Except Almost all the rows 98% where expired cache entries.This was perplexing but Gallery 2 didn’t cleaned there cache but left old cache entries sitting there until some visitor revisited that page I would get updated again but this rarely happens on a family album. Family album flow is typically: “Family event, post pictures, everybody checks them out, no visits in a very long time”. So why store that info for so long, I decided to write a patch and submit and has already made it into the svn. The patch updates every expired entry with a null value so it doesn’t take up any extra space but keeps rows intact for fast updating when revisiting the page. Yes just a update as this will only update 1 index instead of 5 when a insert has to be made. Hopefully some user will be pleasantly surprised with the patch.

Michiel