I have a PHP script which is used to resize images in a user’s FTP folder for use on his website.
While slow to resize, the script has completed correctly with all images in the past. Recently however, the user uploaded an album of 21-Megapixel JPEG images and as I have found, the script is failing to convert the images but not giving out any PHP errors. When I consulted various logs, I’ve found multiple Apache processes being killed off with Out Of Memory errors.
The functional part of the PHP script is essentially a for loop that iterates through my images on the disk and calls a method that checks if a thumbnail exists and then performs the following:
$image = new Imagick();
$image->readImage($target);
$image->thumbnailImage(1000, 0);
$image->writeImage(realpath($basedir)."/".rescale."/".$filename);
$image->clear();
$image->destroy();
The server has 512MB of RAM, with usually at least 360MB+ free.
PHP has it’s memory limit set currently at 96MB, but I have set it higher before without any effect on the issue.
By my estimates, a 21-Megapixel image should occupy in the region of 80MB+ when uncompressed, and so I am puzzled as to why the RAM is disappearing so rapidly unless the Image Magick objects are not being removed from memory.
Is there some way I can optimise my script to use less memory or garbage collect more efficiently?
Do I simply not have the RAM to cope with such large images?
Cheers
Call
$image->setSize()before$image->readImage()to have libjpeg resize the image whilst loading to reduce memory usage.(edit), example usage: Efficient JPEG Image Resizing in PHP