Tile size matters?

[Benjamin Gilbert]

On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 07:55:52AM +0200, Maxim Untesco via openslide-users wrote:
> does a tile size in a .tif piramide influence the quality and the speed of
> virtual slide visualisation?

I'm sure it does to some extent, but I haven't benchmarked it.  I would
guess that a large tile has better throughput than a combination of several
smaller ones *when reading all of the pixels*.  The disadvantage of large
tiles is that if you only want a few pixels (perhaps because you only need
data from the edge of a tile) you have to decode and throw away a larger
number of pixels.

The *latency* of reading a large tile will be higher than for a small one. 
For viewers that render the image in pieces (e.g. OpenSeadragon) that might
affect the perceived rendering performance.

--Benjamin Gilbert