Hello Ambassadors!
This Thursday (June 6th) we'll be migrating our image scaling infrastructure to use a new backend software. The change shouldn't be terribly noticeable to users. If you do notice any changes (for the worse), please do let me/us know!
Currently we use the software ImageMagick to scale images (ie: create different size versions of an image). ImageMagick has performance issues for very large images. After testing we have decided to move to VipsScaler, which is a set of image manipulation tools specially designed for speed and low memory usage.
The extention that takes care of this, along with more information, can be found at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VipsScaler
As always, let me know if you have any questions or if you run into problems.
All the best,
Greg