Thread:Project:Support desk/How to use only small images from commons.wikimedia.org?/reply (4)

pics are not saved in the db. A very limited amount of information is saved each time you use a picture (Basically, page x is using File with name Y. This is so we can do special:whatlinkshere type pages).

The file description is probably cached, and depending on your configuration, it may end up being cached in the database (Specifically the objectcache table) however i wouldn't expect that to take up too much space. [using the db for caching is really slow, things like memcached offer much better performance]

>Does your suggestion (apiThumbCacheExpiry => 0) bring along any drawbacks?

Higher load on commons ;) [Don't worry commons can handle it. That said if you're a major wiki with tens of thousands of hits a day (or more), probably would be polite to not disable the local thumb caching].