Firstly, I really do apologise! CompuVerse has been down for a number of hours now, and I’m really sorry.
I’ll be 100% transparent on this, the server ran out of disk space! This sent it into a sort of “safe mode”, which unfortunately took down CompuVerse.
I have migrated all image storage over to an external server with a large amount more storage.
However, even with this, just the text content and metadata for CompuVerse is still rather large.
I’m going to investigate solutions but am averse to running a DB server over mounted storage as this is very susceptible to latency and speeds.
By my approximations we have around 2 months’ worth of disk space remaining now that Pictrs is removed. I’m looking for solutions in the meantime that will balance performance and cost effectively.
Image compression maybe coule be one solution to consider. However compressing even more already compressed images isn’t easy. A hug drawback would be loosing quality.
There is also the webp format, maybe. It is more efficient than JPG for the same quality.
However I am not sure if it is possible to automate the conversion to webp and if apps and browsers will support it.
Webp has been used for a pretty long time now on the Web, so most browsers should be able to support it. (webp can be lossy and lossless)
Using Webp lossless may allow to save a bit more space than just keeping the jpg/png images as is, while still keeping the quality of the original uploaded image.
Usung Webp lossy would degrade slightly the image compared to the original upload (quality degradation would depend on the chosen quality level for compression and the orignal image as JPG is already lossy). However it will same more space than using the lossless mode.
This would not be the only solution, and is only what I know, more research on the compression formats is needed.