A universal Image Rendering and Resizing Daemon

by btw0 for Wikimedia Foundation

This is a proposal to fix the MediaWiki bug #4854 [1], implementing a daemon program to render and resize images uploaded by Wikipedia users. Separating the image manipulating work from the MediaWiki application will greatly alleviate application server's load, thus improve the overall performance. The API will be designed as general as possible to accommodate the needs of other applications that also render and resize images in large quantity.