The goal of this project is to replace ImageMagick with the VipsScaler extension to MediaWiki on the Wikimedia cluster. This will reduce memory consumption when converting images, since the Vips utility allows for streaming input, whereas ImageMagick must load complete files into memory. Having a more efficient scaler will make it possible to lift some file size limits imposed on the Wikimedia cluster, and generally improve performance.

Timeline

As of February 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has put this on the backburner to deal with other priorities.

A strict timeline is not defined for this project. Here's an ordered list of tasks we plan to accomplish:

• Deployment of comparison tool to test2 (done - 2011-11-30)
• Deployment of image scaler for large files to commons
• Deployment of comparison tool to commons
• Complete replacement of ImageMagick with VipsScaler

Also see "Upcoming VipsScaler deployment" (post from November 2011).

Documents

• User requirements:
• Specifications:
• Software design document: Extension:VipsScaler
• Test plan: Upcoming VipsScaler deployment (Rob Lanphier, November 2011)
• Documentation plan:
• User interface design docs:
• Schedule:
• Task management: bug 28135 "Review and deploy VipsScaler extension" bug in Bugzilla
• Release management plan:
• Communications plan:
• Status updates

Communications

• Gerrit updates to the VipsScaler codebase
• bug 9497 "Thumbnails of large PNGs are not generated"
• VIPS test (Tim Starling, December 2011)
• Test page on test2.wikipedia.org
• bug 24854 "Black/striped thumbnails of CMYK JPEGs".