[ic] Serving the images from a database
Peter
peter at pajamian.dhs.org
Thu May 6 02:50:04 EDT 2004
Lars Segerlund wrote:
>
> There is another reson, and that is to be able to rescale/resize the
> images for serving, ( thus ensuring that you get a decent bandwidth
> usage ).
Point one about resizing images:
There are better ways to increase bandwidth usage than
converting/resizing an image every time someone needs to fetch it. If
you're planning on doing this then it doesn't much matter where the
image is stored, the resizing operation itself takes up a lot of CPU
time and you'll find your server grinding to a halt overnight. My
experience says to do whatever resizing you need to do once. Either
when the image is uploaded initially, or when it is first requested in
that size and store multiple copies of the image in whatever different
sizes you need on your webserver. Then you won't get a major cpu drain
by having your server working overtime resizing images all the time but
you will still get the benefit of smaller images where they're wanted.
Point two about serving images from a db as opposed to off the filesystem:
Web servers are designed to be very fast at serving up static files off
the filesystem. If you throw in an application layer in between such as
what is needed to fetch an image stored in a db then you're slowing the
process down and costing extra cpu time. it's great to store dynamic
content in your db, but for static content such as images it's way
better imo to store it in the filesystem and let the webserver do what
it does best, fast serving up of static files.
Anyways, my two cents,
Peter
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