Posted by J.O. Aho on 05/02/07 05:03

flamer die.spam@hotmail.com wrote:
> can anyone give me a rough idea of what sort of processing power GD/
> php uses to create a thumbnail of a large photo (they range in size
> from 50kb to 5mb).. the script only makes the thumbnail once then
> saves it rather than creates it for each user then delete it,it would
> make 20 thumbs for each page.. around a million photos in total.

The larger the original image is the longer it will take, but I would
recommend you do run throe all the images before you release it for the
public, as there will be noticeable slowdown when generating the
thumbnails, I have been working on a site with creates thumbnails of
500x500 images and when you have 30 images to generate, it's like you
are back on a modem.

> system will be debian stable, sata2 drives.. running just web and
> nothing else.

Do select a good file system, I would recommend jfs, it's usually quite
close to xfs performance, but uses less CPU power. RaiserFS is more CPU
using, but does manage crashes a lot better. Ext2/3 works ok for normal
users. Reiser4 (not yest in default kernels) is still buggy and I don't
recommend the usage of it until it's been at least in two versions of
the official kernel.


--

//Aho

[Back to original message]