Gallery has stopped working and is timing out.

Gallery version 2.3
PHP version 5.2.5
Apache 1.3.41
MySQL 5.0.51a

I started adding photos today (like usual) -- had a few thousand pics in total and growing -- and suddenly I started seeing mysql queries taking 60 seconds involving the view count table

SELECT g2_ImageBlockCacheMap.g_itemId, g2_ItemAttributesMap.g_viewCount FROM g2_ImageBlockCacheMap LEFT JOIN g2_ImageBlockDisabledMap ON g2_ImageBlockCacheMap.g_itemId=g2_ImageBlockDisabledMap.g_itemId, g2_ItemAttributesMap WHERE g2_ImageBlockCacheMap.g_userId = 5 AND g2_ImageBlockCacheMap.g_itemType = 1 AND g2_ImageBlockDisabledMap.g_itemId IS NULL AND g2_ImageBlockCacheMap.g_itemId = g2_ItemAttributesMap.g_itemId ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1:

So gallery2.3 has stopped working. Any help?

Or can you show me how to disable view counts totally? I tried to turn off some parts of the code but failed miserably..