This is just a followup to an earlier question about efficiently thumbnailing images.
I benched everything I could find, which meant the following: netpbm ImageMagick GD Imager
And did so using a 90kb jpg that is scaled to fit a 200x200 box
The GD jpgs didn't look good. So i threw them out of the running.
Using netpbm, you chain different apps from one to another. djeg/cjpeg from the underlying jpg library offer their own methods to read/write from the netpbm formats. reading is considerably faster. writing was often faster, and over several thousand benchmarks proved to be faster -- but was much slower at times as well.
That said, i benchmarked each section
reading a jpeg file
djpeg 0.029
jpegtopnm 0.169
writing a jpeg file
djpeg 0.003
jpegtopnm 0.006
scaling a jpeg file
pnmscale 0.199
Full benchmarks
Fastest NetPBM options - 0.241
ImageMagick - 0.223
Imager - 0.402Every thread I've read has suggested that Imager and Image magick would be the slowest. ImageMagick ended up being the fastest.
I couldn't help myself, and tried doing it in python as well, using the Python Imaging library.
Within the python environment, it took .07 to do the same read/transform/write
Launching a shell script that uses that library from perl (which would include the time of invoking a python interpreter) :
PythonImaging Library - 0.113
Perhaps this info will help someone else in the future.
