Best OS for Imagemagick
Best OS for Imagemagick
Hi guys, been wondering what is the best platform for Imagemagick. I want to adjust on imagemagick needs not Imagemagick will adjust to me.
Re: Best OS for Imagemagick
No one can answer your question properly because you did not list your requirements. However, we found ImageMagick is fastest on a Linux system, multi-cores (4 or more), with at least 8GB of memory. If you're going to process large images, > 8Kx8K, add more memory. Without it, ImageMagick will cache the pixels to disk, so fast disks are a plus (SAS or SSD). Multi-cores are a plus since ImageMagick is threaded, most algorithms will partition the image across each of your cores.
Re: Best OS for Imagemagick
well, I'm not sure why this is in consulting....
I'm a *huge* fan of EBS-backed HVM Ubuntu 12.04LTS in the EC2 cloud. We use c1.xlarge and cc2.8xlarge instances to process thousands of images per day. Both of these instances can perform roughly at the speed of the attached ephemeral storage and have more than ample RAM and network capacity to churn tons of threads. We process primarily in PERL, but that's because one input image creates several output images and PERL saves the step of reading the image in a ton of times by just keeping it in memory.
On a local machine Ubuntu 12 is still a very solid performer. I've ran it virtualized in a virtualbox instance or even the desktop virtualized instances are great. If nothing else developing on Ubuntu is far and wide more friendly than Windows for quick IM scripts. A good network storage where your virtual instances have access to unified storage makes life easier.
In truth you'll realize the biggest gains from getting your code right. Avoid doing things like SRT distortions and milky-smooth blurs on 24 megapixel images unless absolutely necessary. Lots of times a simple -resize and -rotate or -blur stacked 2-3 times at a lower setting is much much much faster. There are also gremlins like if you scale using SRT downward it takes exponentially more time than scaling up. Iron these out and the slowest of machines can churn images quickly. Also avoid using the disk as much as possible. The more commands you can cram on one line with one read and write the better off you'll be.
However, if you're in consulting because you have a ton of images that need processing, I'd love to get you a quote.
I'm a *huge* fan of EBS-backed HVM Ubuntu 12.04LTS in the EC2 cloud. We use c1.xlarge and cc2.8xlarge instances to process thousands of images per day. Both of these instances can perform roughly at the speed of the attached ephemeral storage and have more than ample RAM and network capacity to churn tons of threads. We process primarily in PERL, but that's because one input image creates several output images and PERL saves the step of reading the image in a ton of times by just keeping it in memory.
On a local machine Ubuntu 12 is still a very solid performer. I've ran it virtualized in a virtualbox instance or even the desktop virtualized instances are great. If nothing else developing on Ubuntu is far and wide more friendly than Windows for quick IM scripts. A good network storage where your virtual instances have access to unified storage makes life easier.
In truth you'll realize the biggest gains from getting your code right. Avoid doing things like SRT distortions and milky-smooth blurs on 24 megapixel images unless absolutely necessary. Lots of times a simple -resize and -rotate or -blur stacked 2-3 times at a lower setting is much much much faster. There are also gremlins like if you scale using SRT downward it takes exponentially more time than scaling up. Iron these out and the slowest of machines can churn images quickly. Also avoid using the disk as much as possible. The more commands you can cram on one line with one read and write the better off you'll be.
However, if you're in consulting because you have a ton of images that need processing, I'd love to get you a quote.
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fmw42
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Re: Best OS for Imagemagick
I am moving this from consulting (which is for paid consulting) to the Users forum, since it is a general question about Imagemagick