On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Gilles Dubuc <[email protected]> wrote:

> Currently the file page provides a set of different image sizes for the
> user to directly access. These sizes are usually width-based. However, for
> tall images they are height-based. The thumbnail urls, which are used to
> generate them pass only a width.
>
> What this means is that tall images end up with arbitrary thumbnail widths
> that don't follow the set of sizes meant for the file page. The end result
> from an ops perspective is that we end up with very diverse widths for
> thumbnails. Not a problem in itself, but the exposure of these random-ish
> widths on the file page means that we can't set a different caching policy
> for non-standard widths without affecting the images linked from the file
> page.
>
> I see two solutions to this problem, if we want to introduce different
> caching tiers for thumbnail sizes that come from mediawiki and thumbnail
> sizes that were requested by other things.
>
> The first one would be to always keep the size progression on the file
> page width-bound, even for soft-rotated images. The first drawback of this
> is that for very skinny/very wide images the file size progression between
> the sizes could become steep. The second drawback is that we'd often offer
> less size options, because they'd be based on the smallest dimension.
>
> The second option would be to change the syntax of the thumbnail urls in
> order to allow height constraint. This is a pretty scary change.
>
> If we don't do anything, it simply means that we'll have to apply the same
> caching policy to every size smaller than 1280. We could already save quite
> a bit of storage space by evicting non-standard sizes larger than that, but
> sizes lower than 1280 would have to stay the way they are now.
>
> Thoughts?
>

A workaround would be to add an extra parameter to height-constrained
images, such as 623px-heightconstrained-Foo.png (as far as I can see, this
is a non-scary change), and not purge files which have this parameter. A
bit messy, but if the purging itself is also a temporary workaround until
we have a new storage mechanism with proper usage-based cache eviction,
there is no point messing with fundamentals of the thumbnail url syntax.
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