revorgneil wrote:I went up the depths - 2,3,4,5
2,3 seemed to work in reasonable times, 4 took around about 55sec and loaded, 5 didn't load.
You are speaking about when navigating folders? Keep in mind, when you do this, PHP is only loading one folder at a time so it's normally very fast. When a single folder hits 55 seconds, there are either an insane amount of files in that folder, or your server is simply incredibly slow. Anything beyond 60 seconds will return an error, since this is the defined "timeout" on your server.
revorgneil wrote:Going back down 5,4,3,2 .. seemed to be a lot quicker, still no 5, 4 around 20sec and 3,2 .. 2-3sec - i am guessing this gets cached?
Yes folder data gets cached, and this is very useful, but fresh folders will need to get loaded frequently so this isn't a "solution" to slow loading.
revorgneil wrote:So looks like some ISP improvements made, seems to process past last folder level?
Could be, especially if they said so. I could be wrong, but I suspect this hosting service is not professional ... Are you paying for this service?
revorgneil wrote:Can i ask a related question .. if images, folders changed, renamed etc i guess tool handles dynamically or is there a way to force a re cache etc?
Yes folders get refreshed if anything changes, and that's how cache works. We can't release an application that just serves old data after files change on the server. Files Gallery checks the MTIME (modified time) of each dir before serving cache or fresh data.