Steven comments on the slowness of PerlMagick in the EXIF tag extraction case. I’m pretty sure that it’s not forking a process though — ImageMagick is now a set of libraries which are wrapped to make the command line utilities we all know and love, as well as PerlMagick. So, I don’t think a fork is involved.
I think what is happening here is that ImageMagick is suffering from it’s own generic (and therefore very powerful nature). In return for being able to do heaps of things with heaps of image formats, you get a block of code which simply as efficient as possible in all cases. I haven’t done a code audit to determine if this is the case in this specific incident however.
So, I think PerlMagick is innocent here.
[tags: perlmagick image jpeg exif perl cgi]