Writing image to servlet response with best performance

Question

I\'m writing an image to servlet response with best performance. Any advices, practices, experience?

Answer 1

you can use byte of array type for image from servlet if it is there in Database of Blob type.

byte[] image;

or there is one more way, but it is a bit complex. when u call your servlet, so before that u need to identify if the call is for image or it is normal call. if it is a normal call then u can go ahead to call servlet, but if it a call for image then don't call servlet but u can store the image references at some physical location in computer and retrieve the same.

But this method will not work if u have images in DB, rather u can have relative paths in DB and then u can fetch the image from that path.

Answer 2

For best performance and efficiency, don't put the entire content in byte[]. Each byte eats, yes, one byte from Java's memory. Imagine 100 concurrent users which requests 10 images of each 100KB, that's already 100MB of Java memory eaten away.

Get the image as an InputStream from the DB using ResultSet#getBinaryStream(), wrap it in an BufferedInputStream and write it to the OutputStream of the response wrapped in an BufferedOutputStream through a small byte[] buffer.

Assuming that you select images by the database key as identifier, use this in your HTML:

<img src="images/123">

Create a Servlet class which is mapped in web.xml on an url-pattern of /images/* and implement its doGet() method as follows.:

Long imageId = Long.valueOf(request.getPathInfo().substring(1)); // 123
Image image = imageDAO.find(imageId); // Get Image from DB.
// Image class is just a Javabean with the following properties:
// private String filename;
// private Long length;
// private InputStream content;

response.setHeader("Content-Type", getServletContext().getMimeType(image.getFilename()));
response.setHeader("Content-Length", String.valueOf(image.getLength()));
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline; filename=\"" + image.getFilename() + "\"");

BufferedInputStream input = null;
BufferedOutputStream output = null;

try {
    input = new BufferedInputStream(image.getContent());
    output = new BufferedOutputStream(response.getOutputStream());
    byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
    for (int length = 0; (length = input.read(buffer)) > 0) {
        output.write(buffer, 0, length);
    }
} finally {
    if (output != null) try { output.close(); } catch (IOException logOrIgnore) {}
    if (input != null) try { input.close(); } catch (IOException logOrIgnore) {}
}

In the ImageDAO#find() you can use ResultSet#getBinaryStream() to get the image as an InputStream from the database.

Answer 3

If the images are static, keep in mind that the fastest response is the one that is handled before it gets to you.

You can stand up Apache's httpd in front of your Tomcat server. You can use other variants of caching edge servers. There are plenty of tricks along those lines.

Of course, this supposes that your application is written where a URL effectively maps to one image in a way that is easily cached. If your application lacks this, the benefits are great enough to consider a restructuring.