SuperImage plugin - worried about performance

Rails
1

Hi,
I’m about to create a new home for my wilderness photography and I want
to make it a full-fleddged Web 2.0 app to also act as a marketing tool
for my web development business.

I would like to use the SuperImage plugin for all of the images on the
site, which will include lots of thumbnails and a significant number of
relatively high res images (compared to a “regular” website).

I’m worried about the fact that this plugin would result in my server
doing the work to re-size images over and over again for each user,
rather than just having the properly sized images on disk on the server.
With each user (hopefully) looking at a large number of images, I don’t
think caching will likely make much difference. Caching would mostly
help with a large number of users looking at the same (fairly small) set
of images in the same sizes.

Has anyone here done some sort of a gallery site using this plugin with
a significant amount of traffic? How have you found the performance?

thanks,
jp

2

I cannot say I’ve used the plugin you are referring to below. However,
I’ve had a similar design decision in the past. Not that this is the
best method mind you but it works.

We decided to create a number of resized copies from the original image
and store on the servers. Now all we have to worry about is hard drive
space. Another sticky point was the controversy of do we store the
images on a database server or a content server (the images need to be
shared across a number of web servers). The content server won out in
the end.

In my opinion, rescaling on demand is not a good way to go on this (I’m
guessing I’ll get some heckles for that statement). With hard drives
as cheap as they are, I believe the best choice is to precreate the
thumbnails or whatever it is you’re doing.