This is the simplest and fastest way to serve images. The application simply creates the thumbnail at the first call and serves the thumbnails statically at the later calls. This improves your server performance as it does not need PHP executions and image processing at the later calls. Fast Thumbnail Server uses 404 error handling directive of the web-servers to manage the thumbnail creation of the images. When a browser first request an thumbnail, as it does not exists in the system, the web server redirects the request to 404 page (e404.php should be configured as 404 page). 404 page creates the thumbnail and saves the thumbnail to directory specified in the URL of the request. At later requests of the thumbnail, the thumbnail is served statically from the directory. The later calls does not cause PHP executions.