On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)schwen.de> wrote:
I'm not
sure there is a difference (both hit PHP and neither will
recreate
the image if it exists already), but thumb.php
will result in an error if
Well, here is what Krinkle wrote me
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:FastCCI&diff=1…
The relevant bit is around line 300 in thumb.php (after the comment "Stream
the file if it exists already"). Also, it does return a 304 when
appropriate (of course your browser needs to send an If-Modified-Since
header for that to happen, which it probably won't do). thumb.php streams
the file from a PHP process, while Special:Redirect just sends the browser
to a new location which is served directly by the web server, so that's
indeed less overhead, especially for large files.
Anyway, thumb.php is internals, while Special:Redirect is a public URL, so
it is always more appropriate to use the latter (or the API).