Fastest PNG decoder for .NET

Question

Our web server needs to process many compositions of large images together before sending the results to web clients. This process is performance critical because the server can

Answer 1

You have mutliple options

• Improve the performance of the decoding process

  You could implement another faster png decoder (libpng is a standard library which might be faster) You could switch to another picture format that uses simpler/faster decodeable compression

• Parallelize

  Use the .NET parallel processing capabilities for decoding concurrently. Decoding is likely singlethreaded so this could help if you run on multicore machines

• Store the files uncompressed but on a device that compresses

  For instance a compressed folder or even a sandforce ssd. This will still compress but differently and burden other software with the decompression. I am not sure this will really help and would only try this as a last resort.