Fast Thumbnail Server is a standalone application that helps you to serve thumbnails of the images of in your web site by separate a sub-domain or an other domain.
The application simply creates the thumbnail at the first call and serves the thumbnails statically at the later calls. This improves your server performance as it does not need PHP executions and image processing at the later calls.
Fast Thumbnail Server uses 404 error handling directive of the web-servers to manage the thumbnail creation of the images. When a browser first request an thumbnail, as it does not exists in the system, the web server redirects the request to 404 page (e404.php should be configured as 404 page). 404 page creates the thumbnail and saves the thumbnail to directory specified in the URL of the request. At later requests of the thumbnail, the thumbnail is served statically from the directory. The later calls does not cause PHP executions.
There are many advantages of having a separate image server in your web sites;
- Many browsers will only allocate two sockets to downloading assets from a single host. If you serve images with the same domain of your site images and other contents uses these two sockets. But If you serve images with a sub-domain or other domain, you get an extra two sockets dedicated to download your images.
- With a different domain your server not send the cookies data with every request as the images will be served statically after the first call.
- Using a different domain or sub-domain isolates the functionalities in your application and makes easier to make load balancing in your application.
Todo List
- Multiple directory structure for original files
- Watermark Support
- Config test page