indexArtwork : feature request

[simoncn]

In the early years of MinimServer, I tried to satisfy every user request. This added significant complexity and MinimServer started to acquire a reputation of being very powerful but also very difficult to configure and use.

Because of this, I am now very careful not to add too much complexity when designing a new feature or extending an existing feature. This higher bar inevitably means that some user requests cannot be satisfied. Existing older features have been left unchanged (even if over-complex) because I don't want to break things for users.

An important aspect of complexity is the interaction between different features. The concept of a suffix is currently confined to the reverseName option, which means anyone not using this feature doesn't need to understand it. Adding this (and name reversal) into the description of the index artwork feature would cross the boundary between these different features and would require people reading about index artwork to also read about name reversal and understand it to some extent, if only to satisfy themselves that they can safely ignore it.

There is a cache for index artwork images. Designing this to get acceptable performance with large libraries was a significant challenge and I would prefer not to revisit how it works (for example, to allow different index entries to map to the same image file). This cache is populated dynamically while browsing and cleared when the user browses to a different section of the browse tree. This is because MinimServer doesn't keep the whole browse tree in memory but rebuilds it dynamically in response to browsing requests.

MinimServer itself is not performance-sensitive to image resolution but image resolution does affect browsing performance because larger images need to be sent across the network to control points and processed by them. I cannot give a figure for how large is too large because this depends on network speed and how efficiently the control point handles requests for images. For example, some control points request the same image multiple times in a very short space of time.