I'm generating animated GIF files from multiple source images using Ruby. I need to maximize throughput / minimize time spent to create each GIF. I'd prefer to keep the source images in memory (probably Memcached) rather than read them from disc every time I need them. I've been using convert in backticks to execute imagemagick commands directly from Ruby, e.g.
`convert -delay #{delay} -page #{w}x#{h}+0+0 src01.gif... etc`
I slightly prefer this over RMagick as I've found more examples, I can reference the ImageMagick docs directly. It seems that images passed to the convert command need to be paths to images on disc. Additionally it seems like the output of the convert commend is a file path so the generated image would be written to disc by ImageMagick and I'd need to read it back off disc using Ruby to access the resulting image data. It seems like I'm making ImageMagick read the source images from disc each time and write the generated GIF to disc each time. I think this is likely to be a bottleneck and unnecessary as I don't need to persist the generated images I just need to access their image data in Ruby momentarily.
I noticed that RMagick methods can take Magick::Images as parameters instead of filepaths. I could keep the source images in memory in this case. Additionally RMagick returns the generated image as data to Ruby which is what I need, I don't need it written to disc.
I'm thinking of using RMagick instead of
`convert...`
to reduce disc activity.
So question 1: Does this make sense though? Since RMagick presumably wraps ImageMagick, is RMagick actually reading and writing to disc under the hood or does it have some way of utilizing ImageMagick without disc activity?
And question 2: Is there any way to get image data in and out of ImageMagick's convert command without disc activity?
Hope this makes sense. Just trying to wrap my head around this and apologize if I'm unclear.
Does this make sense though?
Not really. We can argue about open fd's, and cost of shell environments over direct API, but there wouldn't be any disk I/O benefit between the convert utility & RMagick.
Is there any way to get image data in and out of ImageMagick's convert command without disc activity?
ImageMagick ships with stream utility. There's not much usage-documentation, but it could be leveraged to extract the image data to a blob that can be distributed via memcached.
There's also the mpr: protocol to handle label based memory access, but that might not be the distributed solution your looking for. Plus data is removed at time of process completion.
Personally, Marks comment about RAMdisk would be something I would recommend. A simple memory/tmpfs mount is easy to set-up on a system, and then it would just be a matter of updating policy.xml configuration to use said mount as a temporary directory.