On: Racking Mac Pros

[angersock]

As I recall, the basic idea was for something lighter-weight than spinning up and spinning down imagemagick.

Then again, one wonders why not just use FreeImage or something?

[72deluxe → angersock]

Is running imagemagick really that intensive?

Isn't running shaders intensive as it needs to be compiled on the fly and handed off to the GPU driver?

[angersock → 72deluxe]

Switching between shaders is orders of magnitudes cheaper than spinning up and spinning down a process.

[listic → angersock]

How does FreeImage compare to ImageMagick?

[angersock → listic]

It handles image loading, unloading, and basic manipulation options.

I imagine, especially if the traffic is mainly for downsampling, it'd be sufficient. If it's not, then writing some custom code to do the image transforms on a GPU and bring them back shouldn't be that gnarly--and if you can afford to stick a shitton of macs in a data center, you can afford a graphics programmer to get that done.