Generate more throughput for cutycapt and imagemagic to generate thumbnails

I am looking for a solution to generate thumbnail images of screen shots of list of webs sites, and save to disk.

I found the following commands can do that. And I got a working shell script in ubuntu, which generates the images fine. (CutyCapt + ImageMagick packages)

cutycapt --url=http://www.yahoo.com --out=yahoo.png
convert yahoo.png -thumbnail 150x180^ -gravity NorthWest -extent 150x180 yahoothumb.jpg

But, it is sequential and taking lot of time. I thought of creating a PHP or Python script, which I will host as a web page in Apache. Then a separate program will generate multiple requests to increase the throughput of generating images.

I tried PHP first.

<?php echo exec('cutycapt --url=http://www.google.com --out=/var/www/google.png --javascript=on');?>

And CutyCapt fails with following: CutyCapt: Can开发者_运维百科 not connect to X Server. I am running PHP/Apache with the same Identity/user that I run my regular shell script with.

Btw, I am a C# developer. So relatively less familiar with PHP, Linux, Scripts. I can deal with config files for PHP, Apache though :)

I have tried using .NET to launch IE in memory but it's cumbersome and also doesn't produce best results + needs STA: so it will be very less throughput.

I have used the Xvfb and CutyCapt combination detailed on this page in production for a few years without a problem. In fact, I found the combination so reliable, I wrote a Ruby wrapper library (capit) to simplify using the combination from within some new Ruby applications I'm working on.

Also, though I haven't used it in production, I've been able to replicate similar results with the rendering functionality of the PhantomJS library as well.

EDIT:

You may want to check out this article for an example of how to run CutyCapt as a service of sorts.

Instead of relying on an external program to do your image manipulations, try using PHP's built-in GD image library. In my experience, it's super fast and very extensive, providing any and all image analysis and manipulation functionality.

Here's a thumbnailer script I wrote in PHP years ago that, in addition to providing a lot of options, integrates some trickery to automatically load and add borders to the images it creates. Sorry the code is kind of single-purpose, but the techniques it employs are repeatable. Here is the script in action.

Edit:

I was unaware what cutycapt did. Now it seems like this question is related to what you're trying to do; converting a web page to a PDF as a go-between format may get you at least one step closer to the goal.