Symbiostock is a unique piece of software that takes your WordPress site to another level by providing professional, high-end media processing that rivals that of desktop applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator. It relies on your server environment to facilitate this and our team has done extensive testing to ensure that Symbiostock works optimally on as many different hardware setups as possible.
That being said, one important thing to keep in mind is this technology did not exist in a feasible fashion a decade ago, and is still very cutting edge. This means that for most situations it works seamlessly, but when we start trying to process atypically large images or highly complex vectors the memory and CPU requirements can become too large for most web servers to cope with.
Here are some guidelines to follow and look out for:
- If you are on a server using the GD library, which means it does not support ImageMagick via the PHP Imagick module, image processing will be slower, require more resources, and you will not be able to process vectors. This is generally not a recommended solution.
- Vectors require astronomical amounts of resources at times, and if you find your site suffers due to this, it is strongly recommended that you couple all your vectors with Alternate JPEGs. This will remove all problems related to vector processing in 99% of cases.
- With enough memory, processing is done relatively quick. However, if your image is too large, or EPS too complex, the system runs out of memory. In this case, it will try to use virtual memory in the form of disk storage. This is a very slow process that can cause your site to slow down while the media file is being converted.
In 99% of the above cases, going with a high-end hosting provider such as Symbiostock Hosting will solve your issues, but use this as a guideline to minimize and be aware of how media processing works in the web environment to minimize any technical problems.