disk space of part images on peeron.com vs ldraw.org

[Steffen]

(coming back from http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?t...92#pid3992
and from BlueBrick software which needs a unique URL of rendered images of official parts

I just noticed that we might be wasting disk space on our peeron.com / ldraw.org server unnecessarily:

We seem to currently host all images duplicatedly, compare these:

http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/1/u9234c01.png
http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/im...234c01.png

I think that for rendered images, just 1 instance should be sufficient.
That instance should be a ldraw.org address,
as that is the official part source, and so should be for their images.

I think peeron.com could drop their own renderings then.

Is there somewhere documentation on where official images are located?
For example, are there other renderings available, different than 100 pixels wide?

It also appears to me that the recent out of disk space problems
were caused by the renderings of the new part files:
You can check that by seeing that an image
http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/im...234c01.png
exists and has been created on the server, but another one
http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/im...00/992.png
is missing.

I also feel the color 16 renderings
http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/im...234c01.png
missing.

It appears to me that the image generation has been halted somewhere inmidst the generation
of images for update 2012-01.

For efficiency, I suggest to put all the images to a separate server, e.g.
renderedparts.ldraw.org
, thus, other pages downloading these will not impact the performance of the parts tracker negatively.

Also, the generation of these images should be done on a different machine
and simply be uploaded to the server, instead of generating them directly on the server.

To sum this up:
(1) shall we get of the duplicates?
(2) can the images for 2012-01 be completed, please?
(3) what's the official URL for them?
(4) shall we move the images to a different server?
(5) shall the image generation process be put onto a different machine than the web server for them?

[Chris Dee]

Yes, the disc space issue did occur whilst the peeron image regeneration was running.

I'm not familiar with all the history of why Steve Bliss and Dan Boger configured it this way, but one of the last steps in the parts update process that I inherited is to run a script that regenerates the entire parts library (using ldglite) in a hard-coded list of colours (not including 16) for the peeron partsref resource. The output of this is produced on the www.peeron.com server but is synchronised to media.peeron.com (which is a different server) for use by peeron.

This is also the cause of the mis-matched images sizes at the patterned parts summary, which you have question several times in the past.

(1) shall we get (rid) of the duplicates?

That's not really our choice. It's really up to peeron (i.e. Dan Boger) how he wants to manage the generation and hosting of the images for peeron.

(2) can the images for 2012-01 be completed, please?

Yes, but not this week. I am about to go on holiday for a week, and don't want to kick off a long-running script that might disable the sever whilst I am away.

(3) what's the official URL for them?

I think Dan would prefer them to be served-up from http://media.peeron.com/ldraw/images/ - and that seems to serve them a lot faster than the www.ldraw.org location e.g.
full size

scaled to 100px wide

scaled to 16px wide (thumbnail)

(4) shall we move the images to a different server?

They are already - media.peeron.com is a different server.

(5) shall the image generation process be put onto a different machine than the web server for them?

That's not really our call - we get the processor cycles and disc space for free.

However, Orion and I have been talking elsewhere about generating color 16 only LDView images at http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/images - for use by LDraw. That's high on my list for when I get back.

[Steffen]

thanks for the update on this,
and enjoy your vacation!