Speeding up PicturePush

You might have noticed that the PicturePush homepage was a bit slow lately. Profiling showed that 5 seconds were spend on choosing the single random picture on the homepage. Replacing this by a random selection from only the best rated images reduced the query time by a factor 30. So a wise lesson: do not use ORDER BY rand() on queries that return a lot of results (before LIMIT ofcourse).

To speed up a bit more we have spreaded out the images over 5 different subdomains. This should make loading of the albums with all those thumbnails a bit faster. Finally we now provide a list of all members with the number of images and the average image ratings so you can more easily find your friends and other interesting albums.

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