Setting up a picture thumbnail service on Amazon Ec2 - bare minimum PHP

Question

I am looking for a good strategy for setting up a thumbnailing service on the Amazon EC2 free tier +S3, with only the essentials.

After trying a few Lamp configurations on the Micro instance, 610~ MEGS, I am usually left with around 50-200 megs of memory for the actual image processing. There has to be a better way, with an even smaller footprint.

One idea would be to install Debian Squeeze + Php 5, - would this be all I need? Just Shell commands? No apache, nginx, lighthttpd, etc?

I haven't tried the tutorial as featured in the docs here: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1602

as it seems to be unnecessarily complicated and expensive with too many moving parts.

Any ideas, links to tuts or duplicate posts would be a great starting point.

Answer 1

FORGET THIS!

After consulting with my buddy, Jaisen, who runs theopenphotoproject.org, he suggested using imagemagick for resizing a set of thumbnails before uploading.

Before uploading. Heh.

Why overcomplicate things? Sometimes the easiest way is still the best way.