with a memory
friendly in-place library like vips I think we will be
oky. Since the user just waited like 10-15 minutes to upload their huge
image waiting an additional 10-30s at that point for thumbnail and
"instant gratification" of seeing your image on the upload page ... is
not such a big deal.
Well, what about the 5 million other users browsing Special:Newimages?
We don't want 50 simultaneous attempts to build that first
über-thumbnail. :)
Thumbnail generation could be cascaded, i.e. 120px thumbs could be
generated from the 800px previews instead of the original images.