I Benchmarked 17 Image Conversions on My Production Server. Some Results Were Not What I Expected.
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Production image conversion benchmarks with Rust, highly actionable for performance tuning.
A production benchmark of 17 image conversions using Rust and libvips on 50 real images reveals counterintuitive results: HEIC to JPG increases file size by 14%, AVIF Q63 is 7x slower than WebP Q80 for only 10% better compression (55 KB vs 61 KB), and PNG at 600 DPI can be smaller than at 300 DPI due to smoother gradients. The author recommends WebP Q80 as default (64% smaller than JPG, fast encode) and advises against converting HEIC to JPG; for batch pipelines, AVIF's 7x speed penalty may be prohibitive. Data measured on Convertify's production server using Rust and libvips.