11–20 of 36 posts
Isn't it a bit wasteful to resize all those images on the fly? I'd think it's much better to resize them at creation and serve different files as they're needed, assumption being here that dumbly serving a file is more power efficient/cheaper than rescaling a large image every time a smaller version is needed.
Isn't it a bit wasteful to resize all those images on the fly? I'd think it's much better to resize them at creation and serve different files as they're needed, assumption being here that dumbly serving a file is more power efficient/cheaper than rescaling a large image every time a smaller version is needed.
I tried imgix for thumbnails in a web photo album. It was much slower (higher latency) and double the price per bandwidth of Amazon Cloudfront. In general, then, resizing all the images in advance and serving them from a traditional CDN offers a better experience at a better price. Only if that's impossible is imgix a good choice. Being a premium CDN seems a bit like being a premium credit card processor -- as custom…
- Be competitive on price and performance for the basic CDN use case
- Amazon's strategy is to pass on their own costs with a very small margin. If you are serving each Zillow thumbnail by resizing it once in a while on a GPU and caching it in RAM, your costs should be tiny. Then you are just over-charging for bandwidth.
Biggest take-away is think hard about the pricing model. Maybe have big tiers with flat prices and pass on the bandwidth at cost.
I didn't see any documentation about this on their site. Can they deliver, via a single URL, differently sized images for mobile vs desktop? This is one of the biggest headaches when trying to do responsive design.
“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out” Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)
Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.
¹A lot of data centers these days bill you based on the power + bandwidth you consume, not the # of U's you use in a rack.
I store about 300GBs of images. The resized versions take up about 100GBs of the 300.
If I were to then to add retina versions (2x) of each thumbnail, I might be running at 70%+ disk space being used up by thumbnails.
imgix is very interesting, as it would cut my storage costs, decrease my user image upload times ( because I wouldn't have to resize after uploading ). Also I would be free to create 2x retina images, or even new thumbnail sizes as desired.
Only things to justify, are the lock-in with using imgix ( re-writing my site to use it ) and the monthly cost.
Nice marketing though.
So this guy has more computing power than google's entire processing power. What a load of crap. Nice marketing though.
What? Processing a thumbnail is insignificant compared to processing a video - in fact it's on the same magnitude as making a single frame of video... Maybe Google uses a lot of hardware encoders for YouTube?
In any case, I can't believe this is a reason. A billion images? Is nothing for Google. Google was offering a billion hours of cpu time to scientists for free in 2011. Don't tell me that a thumbnail takes an hour... http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/1-billion-computing-c...
Google App Engine now offers the Image Service, but perhaps that was launched after this. https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/images/ove...
> when someone visits the site, imgix will deliver the appropriate photos and, in need be, reformat or resize them. If someone visit your site with an Apple iPad, the service can instantly reformat an image for the tablet’s “Retina” display. I didn't see any documentation about this on their site. Can they deliver, via a single URL, differently sized images for mobile vs desktop? This is one of the biggest headaches…
I guess the imgix guys do something similar.
Serving different images with exactly the same URL is tricky because it will confuse the cache.