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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

I love imgix to death, really the only web service I use daily that constantly amazes me.

I've been using them for a few clients now and it's been a fundamental shift in how we think about media management in the CMS. Rolling out new features with different image size requirements using existing media doesn't require us doing anything other than changing a few parameters in the URL. Before, we'd have to run processing tasks on a fleet of EC2 instances and wait a few days.

We compared a few similar services, but none of them really got the flow right like Imgix does. Some require you to setup the parameters beforehand or define everything in their web interface or via a REST api. And quality wise, none of them are near as good as Imgix.

I can't sing their praises high enough honestly.

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> Before, we'd have to run processing tasks on a fleet of EC2 instances and wait a few days.

Few days? Why?

This particular client has a few hundred thousand images and tens of thousands of animated gifs.

It's the animated gifs that take forever because they have to be processed with gifsicle and then converted to mpeg-4.

Imgix does all of that. I don't know what kind of voodoo they are doing on the gif crop, but it's lightning fast.

This might be more common than you think. I worked at a company a few years ago with ~50 sizes of each image. When we wanted to launch a new page layout (or iOS app, or what have you), it literally required several weeks to render the millions and millions of images to that new size.

And of course things didn't work 100%, since some of the originals had mysteriously disappeared or rotted away. Not to mention the on-going storage costs of these 51 copies of each image, the vast majority of which were never requested even a single time.

Another approach at a different company was to have thousands of EC2 instances running 24/7 to resize images as users uploaded them and another few thousand to handle the backlog that the first group couldn't get to within their time budget. It got the job done, but it was pretty expensive and time consuming to babysit.

2 ways to do thumbnails. 1 Precompute(what they did) and 2 Compute on demand(imgix)

Of course the best is to do something in the middle.

Imgix is the middle, they process the parameters once and cache the result.

That is just caching.

Middle is: You precompute some fixed presets(like him, lower latency) but also have the ability to generate on demand if a preset doesn't exist(used when adding new presets, no reason to wait *days to have the new preset).

Once you've built a system that works fast enough to handle image rendering work on-demand, then adding batch or precomputational features is largely just creating requester logic to ask for the image before the real demand arrives.

Yes. But why should Precompute take a few days?

Perhaps they have a few million images to go through.

Ah. I think you are right. Misread the original post. They want to process "existing media". I was thinking of "new media".

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