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