On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 8:16 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/4/22 Michael Dale <md...@wikimedia.org>: >> Marco Schuster wrote: >>> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Roan Kattouw >>> <roan.katt...@gmail.com>wrote: > >>>> * Zhe Wu, mentored by Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical), will be building a >>>> thumbnailing daemon, so image manipulation won't have to happen on the >>>> Apache servers any more > >>> Wow, I'm lookin' forward to this. Mighta be worth a try to give the upper >>> the ability to choose non-standard resizing filters or so... or full-fledged >>> image manipulation, something like a wiki-style photoshop. > >> I was looking at http://editor.pixastic.com/ ... "wiki-style photoshop" >> would be cool ... but not in the scope of that soc project ;) > > > You can do pretty much anything with ImageMagick. Trouble is that it's > not the fastest at *anything*. Depends how much that affects > performance in practice - something that *just* thumbnails could be > all sorts of more efficient, but you'd need a new program for each > function, and most Unix users of MediaWiki thumbnail with ImageMagick > already so it'll be there. > > > - d. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >
The main issue with the daemon idea (which was discussed at length in #mediawiki a few weeks ago) is that it requires a major change in how we handle images. Right now, the process involves rendering on-demand, rather than at-leisure. This has the benefit of always producing an ideal thumb'd image at the end of every parse. However the major drawbacks are an increase in parsing time (while we wait for ImageMagik to do its thing) and an increased load on the app servers. The only time we can sidestep this is if someone uses a thumb dimension for which we already have a thumb rendered. In order for this to work, we'd need to shift to a style of "render when you get a chance, but give me the best fit for now." Basically, we'd begin parsing and find that we need a thumbnailed copy of some image, but we don't have the ideal size just yet. Instead, we could return the best-fitting thumbnail so far and use that until the daemon has given us the right image. Not an easy task, but I certainly hope some progress can be made on it over the summer :) -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
