Perfectly Clear QuickServer Speed Performance

This FAQ will explain the main factors that affect the performance of Perfectly Clear QuickServer.

Perfectly Clear QuickServer Performance Data

QuickServer can process over 4,000 images per hour, averaging 10 megapixels on modern desktop computers.  High powered workstations can achieve 10,000 images or more per hour. High CPU-count servers with plenty of RAM can expect even higher throughput. For example, a workstation with 8 Cores at 3.0 GHz and 16 GB RAM will process over 6,000 images per hour (averaging 10 megapixels each). 

Processing speed is highly dependent on 4 factors:

1. Computer Specifications – the more CPU cores, and the more powerful your CPU is, the faster your throughout will be. Ensure you have at least 2GB of available RAM per CPU core.
2. Image Size – Processing time is roughly linear with regards to image size for images over about 3 megapixels: a 10 megapixel image takes roughly half the time as a 20 megapixel image.
3. Correction Parameters Applied – and image content. Many of the Perfectly Clear corrections are image-content aware. For example, our noise correction will only apply noise correction when both noise correction is enabled and noise is detected in the source image. Thus, turning on the noise correction tool isn’t always a performance cost, but when noise is present in the images, the incremental processing time can be significant. This applies to the Beautify corrections, Red-eye removal, Tint correction, and to a lesser degree to many of the individual Perfectly Clear core corrections.
4. Cloud Corrections – QuickServer can be used to send images to the Perfectly Clear Cloud to apply background removal or other corrections. These require network access and can take several seconds per image or longer.

Let’s look at each of these in some detail…

1. Computer Specifications

In order to perform an easily repeatable test, we have run the following tests on an Amazon EC2 Windows c7i.2xlarge instance.  This uses an Intel Xeon 8488C CPU with 4 cores at 2.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM, and uses high performance SSD’s.  At the time of writing this instance costs roughly $0.36 per hour (with over 3,000 images per hour, that results in $0.0001194 per image).

Processing scales very linearly with clock speed and the number of cores.

2. Image Size

While larger images take longer to process, there is a fixed amount of processing that must occur for each image. As such, larger images are faster per megapixel than smaller images. The chart below shows this relationship.

Note that performance is a factor of image size (in megapixels) and not file size (in megabytes).

3. Correction Parameters Applied

This graph shows how processing time is affected by the various correction parameters.

The major components of the Perfectly Clear SDK are:

1. Exposure, Sharpen, Super Contrast – these are the core of most corrections and make up about half the overall processing time.
2. AI Corrections – including Scene Detection and AI Image Corrections
3. Noise Removal – including detection and noise removal
4. Retouching – including all the skin and eye enhancements and red-eye removal.
5. Other – including all color correction tools

4. Cloud Corrections

QuickServer has been recently updated to offer an easy way to process your photos in the Perfectly Clear Cloud – including Background Removal and Glasses Glare Removal. Using these tools will require uploading and downloading to our Cloud, and Cloud processing time. These tools are omitted from this data.

Data gathered in August, 2025