We are experiencing quite a high CPU load on our web server right now
(I'm just doing some research, I am not actually the website's administrator)
One of the most significant changes has been a new search results page with larger thumbnail images (25 per page by default). Instead of creating a new, larger thumbnail size, the developers have (for now) actually just used the full sized images at a smaller height and width – apparently because creating a whole new thumbnail size was a fairly big project
I am suspecting that this is the cause for our CPU spike, but I'm not sure - I'd like some information to share with them about it
Could someone confirm and/or explain that constantly delivering significantly larger files could cause an increased load on the CPU, and why?
For reference we have ~2,000,000 images on the website and the size of the thumbnails went up from perhaps 7kb to maybe around 30-40kb on average – individual search results pages roughly doubled in byte size overall
For traffic, we usually have about 200 concurrent users or around 150,000 pageviews per day
Update: It's funny that I should have asked this question today, because a project to create new appropriately sized thumbnails has begun this morning.