ross wrote:Kirby wrote:Thanks for the tip, Ross. All things taken into consideration, is this the route you would take if you did it yourself? Since you said "If you go this route", I'm wondering if you have some other ideas that we haven't considered, yet.
I had actually never considered generating the image on every page load (like you do now) when Adrian and I were working on hacking the phpbb3 code to save the files on the server GD-style. It's very creative, and after seeing it work fairly well, I'm not convinced that the extra server load is significant. However, I think the annoyances of e.g. filenames when you download and other small things make it worth it to switch to the md5sum route.
Oh, another small warning—GoDiscussions had some code that attempted to "phase out" older diagrams (i.e. enabling them to be removed from the server once they were X many months old). The code never worked and actually ended up making multiple unnecessary copies of the entire md5 collection of images and sgfs (another reason why the server tanked), but I just wanted to caution you that this is probably not only unnecessary but possibly counterproductive—old threads are going to be looked at all the time, both by humans and (e.g search engine) bots, so trying to save space by deleting old images isn't going to work very well. You'll probably have to keep them all around until the end of time (which is why the partitioning approach you take is so important). Just another friendly hint.
Thanks, Ross. I think that it's a good idea to partition the folders like you're saying. Maybe we could implement something like a hashtable with the folders as buckets. :-p