Truespectra Image Server

Is it worth it?

[Krapulator]

I am investigating the possiblity of installing the Truespectra image server on our website and I'm just wondering if any fellow Webmaterworldians have used this product and what they think of it.

[Krapulator]

Anyone?

[graywolf]

I have been using it for a while now. We had some problems with load/burst traffic during peak times. We then started to use Akamai for cacheing and that took care of the problem. We had a brief experimentation period with Akamai TTL (time to live) but once we worked that out everything was fine.

You do have to be careful when setting up the software to make sure you have everything correct, its easy to make a mistake and not know it. The phone support has always been good.

One thing to consider the prefered image format is .fpx. Photoshop stoped supporting that format after version 5.5. So you either need to keep an old version around, find another image editing program that does fpx, or use another format, each of which have pros and cons.

If you have a specific question let me know, and I'll try to answer it here, if not I'll sticky you.

[Krapulator]

Thanks Greywolf.

I do have a couple of specific questions.

1. Server overhead - It will be installed on the same machine as the webserver. (Server is getting between 100,000 and 150,000 hits a day). Will there be a noticable impact?

2. Our images are all derived from TIF images which are somewhere between 8 and 10 MB. What kind of delay time would there be in serving a 10MB Tif down to say a 12kb jpg and does it cache this smaller image once it has served it once?

3. The watermark function is a great idea - however the fact that the watermark request is sent in the querystring, to me it seems pointless as it wouldn't take much of a brain to manipulate the querystring and get a copy of the image without the watermark. Is there is a setting on the server itself that you can force the watermark onto certain images without the watermark request being present in the querystring?

4. Is it possible to request only a section of the image (say just the top left 25%)?

Many thanks for your time Greywolf, I really appreciate the advice.

James

[graywolf]

I would definitely try to avoid putting the image server on the webserver. The way it works is it cache's the images and takes a bit of memory. Unless you are serving straight HTML (ie no ASP or CGI or anything similar) this would just get in the way.

I work with 75 - 100 mb fpx's that serve out as jpg's They serve out pretty fast but I don't work with tiff's. You have some control over how much it caches. If any of the variables in the querystring are different it's a new image to cache. So watch the settings in relation to the size of the hard drive. I would turn logging off unless you need it for some reason. Kepp the original images as high in quality as possible, just save them optimized for the web (image preview disabled, exclude non image data). This way you can take advantage of the dynamic zoom server

I don't use the watermark for the reasons you mentioned.

It is possible to serve only a portion of an image, you can even flip, mirror, invert, or rotate it. Bear in mind each time you change something it is a new cache.

Hope that helps

[Krapulator]

Yep thats excellent.

Thanks Again!