On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 9:31 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 1 September 2012 00:38, Brion Vibber brion@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