Hello, My next project will be a kind of online photo viewer. All of these photos will need to have watermark applied to them. The problem is that, depending on the picture, different watermarks need to be applied. The easiest solution would be to process these picture at runtime using GD, apply the watermark(s) and serve them. The other approach, would be to pre-process them (maybe using GD) and create different copies on the disk, the obvious advantage being that it could be served directly via the webserver (apache), but, it would be much harder to manage (need to fix a watermark error? Re-process and re-create the images on the disk...) and would take much more disk space. I would rather process them at runtime, per request, however, this site will probably have lots of traffic. So, I've reached a deadend. Could someone share his/her experiences and thoughts and help me decide? :)
FYI, The application would be custom built from the ground up using PHP 5 (Not sure if we will use a framework, if we happen to use, it will be probably CakePHP). At first, there would be no clusters, proxies or balancers, just a plain dedicated server with a good CPU, about 4GB RAM and lots of disk space. PS: I've put DoS in the subject tagline meaning Denial of Service as I think that maybe dynamic processing of images X lots of request could result in DoS. Thanks in advance, Marcelo.
