[ic] Serving the images from a database

[Peter]

Lars Segerlund wrote:
> 
> There is another reson, and that is to be able to rescale/resize the 
> images for serving, ( thus ensuring that you get a decent bandwidth 
> usage ).

Point one about resizing images:

There are better ways to increase bandwidth usage than 
converting/resizing an image every time someone needs to fetch it.  If 
you're planning on doing this then it doesn't much matter where the 
image is stored, the resizing operation itself takes up a lot of CPU 
time and you'll find your server grinding to a halt overnight.  My 
experience says to do whatever resizing you need to do once.  Either 
when the image is uploaded initially, or when it is first requested in 
that size and store multiple copies of the image in whatever different 
sizes you need on your webserver.  Then you won't get a major cpu drain 
by having your server working overtime resizing images all the time but 
you will still get the benefit of smaller images where they're wanted.

Point two about serving images from a db as opposed to off the filesystem:

Web servers are designed to be very fast at serving up static files off 
the filesystem.  If you throw in an application layer in between such as 
what is needed to fetch an image stored in a db then you're slowing the 
process down and costing extra cpu time.  it's great to store dynamic 
content in your db, but for static content such as images it's way 
better imo to store it in the filesystem and let the webserver do what 
it does best, fast serving up of static files.

Anyways, my two cents,

Peter