Question

I’ve recently started trying to increase my sites performance. One of the biggest obstacles I have are the number of thumbnails being displayed.

I currently use the full size image and scale it down by defining a height/width value in the img tag. This doesn’t seem very efficient so my question is whats the recommended way to display thumbnails? Should I maintain a second table in the DB for thumbnails or is there a better solution?

Answer 1

Processing images takes its (cpu) toll, you should better avoid it where possible.

My advice:
Create the thumbnails while uploading the images into separate image files, this way you can determine when to create/resize them – and not during runtime.

If you want the links to the thumbnails in a separate database field or derive it from the original name, is entirely up to you – both ways work.

This makes additional performance boosters easier to implement too (p.e. caching).

I’ve implemented a similar process in a php based project, its a good way to scale out. In my case, I am creating the thumbnails nightly via cron, because system load is very low in that time.