My feedback: G2 is too slow, too heavy / big and uses to much server load.

I have to agree with arcnet. Gallery 2 looks, sorry, IS promising but speed is a real issue with me too. About simplicity, that's good enough for me, it's the loading speed of the main page that makes it unusable to me.

I have Gallery 2 installed for a couple of days so I'm still trying to find a way to make it work fast enough, I really would like to see it in full speed ;)

we're constantly improving g2 not only by adding features and modules, but also by refactoring it's core architecture.
G2.1 will have less files (core module) and it should also be a little faster. we haven't focused that much on speed for G2.1, but some development resource went into improving performance too.
we hoped to have downloadable plugins (DP) for g2.1, but the developer responsible for that task got very ill. fortunately he is back now and we will have DP after G2.1. with DP, you will only have to upload the core module to your server and all other modules will be installed directly from the internet, without ftp.

g2 targets not only small websites with 100 photos but huge community sites with a million photos and thousands of users. some users want a lean, mean, super simple photo album, other users want a thousand of features.
the long-term perspective of g2 is to make the core module smaller, faster and even more modular and extensible and g2.1 is a step into that direction.

@security:
g2 is very secure (image firewall, per image permissions) and it will either improve with or just confirmed by the upcoming security audit by an independent security expert.

@usability:
we're working together with usability experts to improve g2. we are absolutely aware that g2 is not all that intuitive, especially without documentation. apropos, we're working with a documentation expert to organize our docs. it all takes some time.

besides:
i'm running g2 with just 2250 images on a shared webhost and the performance is good.
if you choose a super cheap webhost, you get what you're paying for. i'm paying $8/month and that's fine. if you pay too much and it's still slow, you chose the wrong webhost.

I have noticed when there's a lot of users on the gallery at once, apache starts like 50 children servers, and the whole server just stops.
This only happends when they are surfing in the gallery..
Is this something that's wrong with my setup, or with the way gallery is made? I think I tried to set down the number of children processes,
but I don't think it worked :P

so, when the server starts all these children, I see the avg. load goes up to 50, and all up to 60.. (linux), and it's impossible to surf
on any page. I can either restart apache (which aint easy when the whole server lags :P) or just wait and let it pass by..

You get hundreds of hits for many of Gallery's problem.
That's because we have a lot of users and because the documentation is lacking so everyone creates a new topic about the same issues again and again.

We'll launch reorganized documentation in a few days, so this has been addressed.

And performance depends on your system. For some reason, G2 can be dog-slow on very fast hardware, we've heard about this mostly from users of Windows based servers.
But Gallery can also run reasonably fast. See care2 (thousands of users, more than a million of items). Or http://gallery.menalto.com, we have a lot of hits as well and the Gallery isn't really slow.

We provide a guide to address performance issues and we're open to discussions. There's no point in blaming the community or the developers about a lack of honesty.