The Seaside book says: "saving [an image] while processing http requests is a risk you want to avoid“.
Why is this? Does it just temporarily slow down serving http requests or will requests get lost or will errors occur?
Before an image is saved registered shutdown actions are executed. This means source files are closed and web servers are shut down. After the image is saved it executes the startup actions, which typically bring up the web-server again. Depending on the server implementation open connections might be closed.
This means that you cannot accept new connections while you save an image and open connections might be temporarily suspended or closed. For both issues there are (at least) two easy workarounds:
Fork the image using OSProcess before you save it (DabbleDB, CmsBox).
Use multiple images and a load balancer so that you can remove images one at a time from the active servers before saving them.