Oct 28, 2022
This works surprisingly well – and, best of all, allows us to keep our infrastructure simple. If not for this trick, we’d need to implement a separate queueing system for converting images in the background. But with this trick, we don’t need to – so there’s no extra complexity and no extra bugs.
When We Don’t Use AVIF
This is a common approach, and it works well, but it comes with a drawback. Because the first uncached request has to convert and resize the image, it takes longer than subsequent ones. With WebP, “longer” is noticeable but acceptable: in our infrastructure, WebP conversion typically adds 100-300 milliseconds. However, with AVIF, this grows to 1-2 seconds.
This works surprisingly well – and, best of all, allows us to keep our infrastructure simple. If not for this trick, we’d need to implement a separate queueing system for converting images in the background. But with this trick, we don’t need to – so there’s no extra complexity and no extra bugs.
When We Don’t Use AVIF
This is a common approach, and it works well, but it comes with a drawback. Because the first uncached request has to convert and resize the image, it takes longer than subsequent ones. With WebP, “longer” is noticeable but acceptable: in our infrastructure, WebP conversion typically adds 100-300 milliseconds. However, with AVIF, this grows to 1-2 seconds.