Speeding up Media Tags with WP_Query

I’ve got a media heavy site and found get_attachments_by_media_tags() to be slow when querying for image tags. I had been trying cache the queries using transient caching, but found that to be more of a temporary fix.

I decided to try and use WP_Query yesterday, and found it to be rather easy and much faster. I didn’t benchmark to see how much faster, but it is a noticeable difference.

Here’s what I did:

<?php $media_args = array(
            'post_type' => 'attachment',
            'post_status' => 'inherit',
            'tax_query' => array(
                array(
                    'taxonomy' => 'media-tags',
                    'field' => 'slug',
                    'terms' => YOUR-MEDIA-TAG-SLUG-HERE
                )
            )
        );
        $media_items = new WP_Query($media_args);

if ($media_items->have_posts()) {
            while ($media_items->have_posts()) {
                $media_items->the_post();
                    $media_image = wp_get_attachment_image_src($post->ID);
?>

<img src="<php echo $media_image[0]; ?>" />

<?php
}
}
?>

Would be interested to see if anyone has tried anything similar and what their results were?

http://wordpress.org/plugins/media-tags/