Dear Faidon,
I would like to follow up on our discussions about pre-rendering thumbnails on the back-end, so users can see images faster when they load them in Media Viewer.
How are you coming along with this project? My understanding is that ops procured the hardware needed for that task weeks ago, but needed more time to set up a server-side image pre-rendering service.
We’re still getting a lot of user feedback that images take too long to load, particularly from users with slow connections. We’ve implemented as many solutions as we could find to speed up image load on the front-end, but are now running out of options. So the back-end pre-rendering approach is our only hope for addressing these user concerns at this time.
What do you think is a reasonable ETA for this solution from your perspective? Is there anyone on your team we should be working with to help make this happen? I know you’ve talked to Gilles about this in the past, but wanted to follow up now, since he’s on vacation this week and you will soon become less available. :)
Look forward to working together to add this last missing piece to improve the viewing experience for our users — as well as address performance issues across our sites.
Cheers,
Fabrice
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Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation