filePro help needed...

[Fairlight]

At Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 06:30:43AM -0800 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bob Rasmussen was observed uttering:
> On Sun, 6 Dec 2009, Brian K. White wrote:
> 
> > (clipping a lot) 
> > 
> > It does put a heavy new workload on your servers though. Image 
> > processing is heavy cpu work compared to anything you normally do in 
> > filepro, and it quickly fills up hard drives.
> > At low volumes and low user counts you might not notice at first, 
> > because you almost can't buy a server today that isn't over-spec for 5 
> > or 10 users doing just ordinary filepro work, so you can add some more 
> > work without noticing.
> > But dealing with scanned images quickly adds up to tax a server once you 
> > actually start using it a little.
> 
> While I can understand the heavy storage requirements on the server, I'm 
> curious about the CPU-intensive part. What do you do with the image files 
> on the server other than store them and feed them back?

Automated ImageMagick processing, or the like, perhaps?  I can see
conversions, resizes, watermarking, etc., being done in an automated
fashion.

And it could get worse...imagine if you tried driving video, not just still
images.  Video transcoding like YouTube does is -not- a low-horsepower
task, especially on the scale at which they do it, but even one video at a
time--video transcoding is a huge resource hog on the best of hardware.
The -best- I've seen out of a Core2 Duo E8400 at 3GHz is 190fps, and that'
actually really rare.  Usually it tops out at 130fps or so.  Spread that
across any goodish volume of processing...  Even a quad Xeon top of the
line rig won't get you all that far.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,