Fast Imaging for Webserver

[Prateek]

Hi. I'm creating a web-application using CherryPy 2.2.1. My application
needs to process images (JPG/PNG files) to

1) create thumbnails (resize them)
2) overlay them on a custom background (a simple frame)
3) Overlay 'badges' (small 16x16 images) on top of the final thumbnail

I am using PIL 1.1.5 which I have custom compiled on my development
machine (MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz Core Duo)..
I am using im.thumbnail for step 1 and im.paste for steps 2 and 3.

The problem is that this thing is just way too slow.
For ab -n 1000 -C session_id=2f55ae2dfefa896f67a80f73045aadfa4b4269f1
http://localhost:8080/imaging/icon/def/128/255 (where def is the name
of the image - default in this case - 128 is the size in pixels and 255
is the background color), I am getting:

Document Path:          /imaging/icon/def/128/255
Document Length:        14417 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   18.664 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      14680000 bytes
HTML transferred:       14417000 bytes
Requests per second:    53.58 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       18.66 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       18.66 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent
requests)
Transfer rate:          786.54 [Kbytes/sec] received

FYI: This request returns a PNG image (image/png) and not html

My understanding is that the problem is either with the CherryPy setup
(which is likely because even in other cases, i don't get much more
than 65 requests per second) or PIL itself (even though I'm caching the
background images and source images)

Does anyone have a better solution? Is there a faster replacement for
PIL?

Thanks in advance.
Prateek