On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 9:31 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1 September 2012 00:38, Brion Vibber
<brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
The current syntax is actually hard to
machine-parse, with lots of
language-specific overrides and weird options that combine in non-obvious
ways. Not to mention that it overrides the simple link syntax... I wish
when we'd renamed Image: to File: that we'd left the magic behavior only
on
the Image: alias so that links would be
rationalized. :(
PROBLEM: Thumbnails are taking up a lot of disk space.
SOLUTION: Completely revamp image syntax in a backwards-incompatible
manner.
There's something excessive there ...
Nah, we're just years behind on modernizing image handling. Such
improvements need to be done at some point regardless of this particular
question, but it would help with it in certain ways.
Is it really the case that the server can't get atime of the images?
iIf it can, then we *know* which thumbs may as well be
trashed and
regenerated as and when someone cares. If it can't, why not?
I'd tend to think that image scaler CPU time is more precious than disk
space used by thumbs; in theory we don't actually need to "store" thumbs if
we just cache them and have a suitably large cache. A caching HTTP proxy
should have some sort of LRU-or-other system to discard old things that
aren't being used; my main worry would be about whether the system can
survive the load of a cache being cleared (say due to downtime, upgrades,
incompatible storage formats for upgrades, or whatever).
Of course if you don't have to scale anything on demand on the server side,
suddenly the entire problem disappears. Just something to think about.
-- brion