A portable OpenSlide viewer for Windows: Smart Zoom Viewer

[jcupitt at gmail.com]

Hi Dmitry,

On 17 November 2015 at 23:05, Dmitry Fedorov <fedorov at ece.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> This is a very interesting discussion and I wanted to add my 5 cents to it.
> John's arguments seem extremely compelling for a static view of the data. On
> the other hand if any processing may have to happen to the original data
> prior to visualization then using pyramidal TIFF may become more
> interesting. We are developing BisQue which serves life-sciences image data

I agree, if you are doing server-side image processing then pyramidal
tiff is a good storage format. As you say, szi is really for serving
static images.

>> Serving a deepzoom client from a pyramidal tiff on a server is very
>> slow and is rather difficult to implement. Serving a deepzoom client
>> from a huge directory tree is hard to manage on Windows and is rather
>> inefficient with storage.
>
> I disagree that reading tiles from a pyramidal tiff is very slow, it's is
> obviously slower, but with required processing it's not much slower. We can

I probably should have said expensive rather than slow. You can
certainly serve deepzoom clients from pyramidal tiff with good latency
if you have a fast enough server, but it will become expensive if you
want to support large numbers of simultaneous users.

You can serve szi with almost zero server CPU load, though obviously
there will still be disk and bandwidth costs to consider.

John