Hacker News Reader

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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com