Image resizing efficiency in C# and .NET 3.5

Question

I have written a web service to resize user uploaded images and all works correctly from a functional point of view, but it causes CPU usage to spike every time it is used.

Answer 1

When you write

I have written a web service to resize user uploaded images

It sounds to mee that the user uploads an image to a (web?) server, and the server then calls a web service to do the scaling?

If that is the case, I would simply move the scaling directly to the server. Imho, scaling an image doesn't justify it's own web service. And you get quite a bit unnecessary traffic going from the server to the web service, and back. In particular because the image is probably base64 encoded, which makes the data traffic even bigger.

But I'm just guessing here.

p.s. Unsafe blocks in itself doesn't give any gain, they just allow unsafe code to be compiled. So unless you write your own scaling routing, an unsafe block isn't going to help.