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Your own 'Images as a Service' The average web page size is greater than 2MB, and increasing. And great swathes of that are images. Serving the right size of image can vastly improve the experience for your users. But while we're arguing about whether Rails is slow or not we're chucking vast images at peoples phones over EDGE connections. Serving images should be a 'solved' problem, just like it is for 'hosting' or authentication. However lots of solutions make poor default suggestions. What can we do for our users with 100 lines of code, Sinatra, a single gem and a CDN? Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/H05Y/
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# Summary of 'Images as a Service' In his talk at RubyConf 2015, Andy Croll discusses the critical topic of 'Images as a Service,' emphasizing the importance of optimizing image serving to enhance user experience on the web. He outlines the challenges presented by the increasing size of web pages, particularly due to images, which now average over 2MB in size. ## Key Points Discussed: - **Growth of Web Pages and Image Sizes:** - Average web page sizes have increased significantly, now being 3.5 times larger than five years ago, with images making up a large part of this growth due to their bandwidth consumption. - The need for speed is underscored, given that most connections do not achieve expected speeds, especially on mobile devices. - **User Experience Impact:** - Slow loading times critically affect user interaction, as highlighted by examples from Amazon and HouseTrip, where faster page loads led to improved user engagement. - **Practical Solutions for Serving Images:** - Encourages the use of responsive imagery practices, which tailor image delivery based on the device's screen size. - Introduces the 'source set' attribute in HTML to suggest appropriate image resolutions to browsers. - Describes implementing progressive enhancement and how browsers can selectively load images of varying sizes and formats like WebP. - **Use of Sinatra and CDNs:** - Proposes a simple architecture using Sinatra and Dragonfly for image processing, demonstrating how developers can serve appropriately sized images without significant overhead. - Highlights the importance of using CDNs to serve images efficiently, ensuring faster load times by caching and delivering images closer to the end-user. - **Performance Testing:** - Croll shares insights from performance tests using Apache Bench, illustrating that optimized images significantly improve load times and user experience. - Discusses the balance between image size and processing capabilities, revealing that smaller images yield substantial bandwidth savings. ## Conclusions and Takeaways: - **Prioritizing Speed:** - It is vital to minimize the asset sizes and focus solely on what is necessary for proper rendering. Speed directly influences user experience, and adopting a microservices architecture can help streamline this process. - Croll encourages the exploration of available tools and services, suggesting that developers engage with modern practices and technologies to enhance image serving strategies. - **Caching and Efficient Asset Serving:** - He advocates for using CDNs and caching strategies to mitigate the load on Rails applications, allowing them to focus on core functionalities rather than asset delivery. In summary, Andy's talk emphasizes that while web content grows in complexity and size, developers must adopt thoughtful strategies for serving images to retain user satisfaction and engagement.
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