Most Neos websites or Flow applications usually use ImageMagick and GD for rendering smaller versions of photos or previews of other media assets. While these libraries are quite powerful, they need a big amount of memory for processing images. It can easily happen for a Neos page with a lot of thumbnails to consume hundreds of Megabytes of RAM to create the respective image files. When the original assets are rather large or you need to process animated GIFs, you might even need Gigabytes of RAM just for rendering that page.

Fortunately, Beach now supports libvips, a low-level code library which can do almost the same things like ImageMagick, but much faster and with a relatively small memory footprint. Yet more fortunately, Neos and Flow do support libvips, with just a little configuration.

You can use Vips in your own projects, too - just included the necessary Composer dependency and Neos.Media configuration. If you're not using Beach, you also need to compile the libvips support as an extension for your PHP setup.

If you'd like to start using Vips, just head over to our support article which covers all the details.