Improving Gallery 1 Performance

For two years, I have managed a large number of photo sites that all use Gallery 1 [just completed upgrading to 1.5.1]. Most of these sites have between 2,000 and 5,000 photos on them. All are performing OK, but I've been told that Gallery 1 shows significantly degraded performance when handling more than 5,000 to 10,000 images. One site plans to add all their images from their accumulated stock archive to their gallery over the next few months, about 15,000 images total, so I'm concerned with breaking Gallery.

If I was starting out fresh, I would try going with Gallery 2 and a multi-site option. But under my current circumstances, migrating to Gallery 2 does not look practical.

So my question is, what are the main performance drivers for Gallery 1 that limit it performance when handling more than 5-10 thousand images?

Over 90% of the albums of the sites I managed are static 90% of the time. So could these problems be mitigated by modifying Gallery to load a static html index page for an album if one existed? Could they be mitigated by indexing the key info for the main gallery page: Album title, description, URL, number of images, and mod date; in a text file, that the main page would read when loading instaed of reading that data from the Albums folder? The index page and the text file would be recreated only when the Admin added or modified an album.

I would appreciate any feedback or suggesting as to what extent such an approach ould allow me to handle very large numbers of images while still using Gallery 1.

Yes, I did. That is where I found out about the problems with more than 5-10 thousand images. I've already implemented all the suggestions except caching. I guess what I was asking was is there a way to cache the whole site, or at least all the Gallery and album pages, not just the main Gallery page?

There is no hard coded limit as such, but you will probably run into problems with that amount of albums/pictures. Sadly that is a G1 limitation, that G2 rectifies.

Thanks very much for the comment. May I ask what sort of server you are running on? RAM, CPU speed, RAID etc?

Thanks, but I run my own server and am happy with it. I'm not having any issues right now, but some of my site will probably grow to 25,000 to 30,000 images over the next 6 months and I wanted to now what to expect.