title: How can I speed up Image Magick image processing commands in Linux?
body: <p>I am using Image Magick in my PHP program on linux to process some images.  In one case we are taking layers from a PSD and displaying certain layers and colorizing them.  In others, we are overlaying 3 or so PNG images and then returning a final image.  We are using PHP but we use the system command to run the commands like at the command prompt and then serve up the image to the browser.  It seems very slow.  Caching is not an option because of the myriad of possible combinations.  The images are not that large and it takes sometimes 5 seconds per image to process and it seems that the server only does them one at a time (I am assuming that the browser is probably asking for more than one image concurrently.).  We have put the site on a very beefy server.  Is there somewhere that I can allocate more memory or processing power to these Image Magick commands like "convert"?</p>