Ariel T. Glenn wrote:
So it's time to have this discussion again. At least, I think we're having it again, though I could not find previous threads on this list about the subject.
In short, scaled media is currently generated on the fly for any size and for any user. The resulting files are kept around forever or until we run perilously short of space, at which point we make some guesses about what we can toss and then do a mass purge. Last time we did so, we had the rotation bug going at the same time, which made for a real fine mess.
A little bit of crunching shows me that we have about 6 million images in use on the projects, and yet we manage to have around 130 million thumbnails. Just for fun I checked to see how many thumbs each image has, what sizes we are looking at, etc. Here's the results.
Only really tangentially related, but I remember thinking when reading this thread: are there any pages (on wikitech.wikimedia.org or elsewhere) that document Wikimedia's current media infrastructure? It's always been a bit of a mystery to me.
MZMcBride