This benchmarks the lua-vips image processing module against magick.

The test is a very simple one:

• Load a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel JPEG image.
• Crop 100 pixels from every edge.
• Shrink by 10% using lanczos2 interpolator.
• Sharpen with sigma 1
• Save back as a new JPEG image.

This is not a complex test, but it is easy to implement and does exercise image load, save, resample and filter.

Run on 1/6/17 with libvips 8.5 and imagemagick 6.9.7-4, and magick-1.3.0-1 and lua-vips 0.1-1 on a two core (four thread) laptop.

$ ./runner 
building test image ...
tile=10
test image is 5000 by 5000 pixels
make jpeg derivatives ...
timing ./magick.lua ... done
timing ./vips.lua ... done
measuring memuse for ./magick.lua ... done
measuring memuse for ./vips.lua ... done
real time in seconds, fastest of three runs
benchmark	jpeg
vips.lua	0.69	
magick.lua	5.20	
peak memory use in KB
benchmark	peak RSS
vips.lua	49816
magick.lua	496908

So on this test and on this laptop, lua-vips is 7.5x faster and needs 10x less memory.

For lua-vips it's:

sudo apt-get install libvips42
luarocks install lua-vips

For magick, you need:

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev
luarocks install magick