On 09/01/2008, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Norbert Hoeller wrote:
uncompressed. I have seen indications that ImageMagick requires less memory than the standard GD library when creating thumbnails, but have not been able to test myself (standard ImageMagick install will not work in a shared environment).
There are three main benefits of using ImageMagick:
- Better scaling quality
- Since it runs out of process, if the scaling fails (eg due to memory
limits), the rest of the wiki keeps running. You just don't have a working image. 3) For JPEG images (at least in some versions), ImageMagick can scale large images without decompressing the entire file into memory/scratch space first. (GIF and PNG images still require loading the whole thing.)
ImageMagick really is the nicer way to do this stuff. I found it a bit painful on Solaris 9, with no package repository system and resolving dependencies by hand from sunfreeware.com ... BlastWave on Solaris 10 is a bit easier. But the best way is IME to use a Linux system with a good repository. (CentOS 4.5 was okay for me - the only annoying bits were PHP 5 stuff from centosplus and one RPM for PHP5 to talk to MySQL. Yes, I'll document this on mediawiki.org some time ...)
ImageMagick also does SVGs, but it's crap at them. librsvg is the only sane way IMO. This too has a ridiculously long string of dependencies (probably all the way down to the original .au of the Free Software Song) so you really don't even want to attempt it unless it's in the repository system of whatever you're installing it on. (again, fine on CentOS 4.5.)
- d.