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Image quality comparison
No, no, wait! I'm not off-topic 
As you may (or may not) know, all the images on seti.matroxusers.com are pre-computed on my own computer and then uploaded to the server.
This is becoming a problem in several ways:
- It's a waste of bandwidth (~10 MB is uploaded every hour just for seti@murc; the other sizes are comparable, but the uploads are less frequent). Personally, I can live with that. My employer is connected at > 1 Gb/s so I'm not really worried. What I don't know though is whether Ant will have to pay for the FTP-upload traffic.
- It's also becoming a bit of a burden on my (aging) workstation... Computing the images takes away about 10 percent of (one of) my workstation's CPU/memory. This is not only bad for my crunching statistics
, but also makes my computer rather unusable for a considerable amount of time.
Consider the above a prelude to my real question...
I've cooked up an alternative solution... I've made a script that can run on the server and will generate the images "on-the-fly". I would just have to upload a small datafile (I have to do that anyway) and the images are created from that.
Right now, the script is only for seti@murc. What I'd like y'all to do is to compare the "static" images with the "dynamic" ones. I see two possible problems:
- The images are perhaps not quite as nice. I can't use the fonts that I'm using for the static images. On the other hand, it would now be feasible to enlarge the dynamic images (it would take too much bandwidth for the static ones). To make for a fair comparison, the dynamic image is now just as large as the static one.
- Maybe the computation of the images will have an impact on server performance. It's difficult for me to judge, but I don't think so (it only takes a fraction of a second, and just when someone requests an image). Maybe Ant can comment on this.
Boy, this post is getting long...
Short summary: please compare this (static):
with this (dynamic):
and tell me what you think.
Martin
As you may (or may not) know, all the images on seti.matroxusers.com are pre-computed on my own computer and then uploaded to the server.
This is becoming a problem in several ways:
- It's a waste of bandwidth (~10 MB is uploaded every hour just for seti@murc; the other sizes are comparable, but the uploads are less frequent). Personally, I can live with that. My employer is connected at > 1 Gb/s so I'm not really worried. What I don't know though is whether Ant will have to pay for the FTP-upload traffic.
- It's also becoming a bit of a burden on my (aging) workstation... Computing the images takes away about 10 percent of (one of) my workstation's CPU/memory. This is not only bad for my crunching statistics
, but also makes my computer rather unusable for a considerable amount of time.Consider the above a prelude to my real question...
I've cooked up an alternative solution... I've made a script that can run on the server and will generate the images "on-the-fly". I would just have to upload a small datafile (I have to do that anyway) and the images are created from that.
Right now, the script is only for seti@murc. What I'd like y'all to do is to compare the "static" images with the "dynamic" ones. I see two possible problems:
- The images are perhaps not quite as nice. I can't use the fonts that I'm using for the static images. On the other hand, it would now be feasible to enlarge the dynamic images (it would take too much bandwidth for the static ones). To make for a fair comparison, the dynamic image is now just as large as the static one.
- Maybe the computation of the images will have an impact on server performance. It's difficult for me to judge, but I don't think so (it only takes a fraction of a second, and just when someone requests an image). Maybe Ant can comment on this.
Boy, this post is getting long...
Short summary: please compare this (static):
with this (dynamic):
and tell me what you think.
Martin
.
Comment