This week saw the election of a new president of America – triggering a massive spike in hope levels worldwide. At last the Bush years are drawing to a close.

On the Elgg front, I spent a good portion of the week optimising various parts of the system and drastically reducing the number of queries per page.

A lot of this was done by introducing a query cache into database.php which caches the results of individual queries. I also introduced some new delayed execution functionality on database queries – letting you delay some database operations until after the page has been sent to the browser.

All of these tweaks have slashed the number of queries being executed per page.

This week I also began to experiment with memcache – currently caching entities, datalists, metastrings and meta data. Reducing the number of queries per page to ~7 once the cache has been populated.

I also did a little bit of work on the activity stream, river and syndication… but more on this later…