Delivering images to users as fast as possible is crucial for any web application. In the pre-processing era, we didn't care much about the image

Image processing servers benchmark

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2024-04-24 15:30:02

Delivering images to users as fast as possible is crucial for any web application. In the pre-processing era, we didn't care much about the image processing speed since all the images were processed when they were uploaded. But now, with the rise of on-the-fly image processing, picking the fastest server is critical. In this article, we will compare the performance of the most popular image processing servers.

In our previous benchmark that we ran in 2019, we included more tools like imaginary, Pillbox, and some pure Go servers. However, at the moment of writing this article, imaginary seems to be abandoned, and Pillbox is marked as deprecated. We also excluded pure Go servers since they show very poor performance.

All the tools were running in Docker containers. For imgproxy and imagor, we used the latest versions of the official Docker images. Thumbor lacks an official Docker image, so we built a Docker image with the latest version of thumbor.

The test images were taken from the DIV2K dataset and converted to JPEG, PNG, WebP, and AVIF formats. The images were served with a local Nginx server to mitigate any network speed fluctuations.