quest

[Paul G. Allen]

> Marcelo Jury wrote:
> 
> Hello sr.
> 
> I read something about 5 mins to wait!! this is too much time, why?
> I wonder if mapserver software is suitable to use in big sites like
> yellow pages, in comparison to objectfx. How do you compare those
> products?
> 

The computer that my site is running on (http://24.5.14.144:80 - yes,
it needs to be updated) is very slow by today's standards, and is not
only my map and web server, but a file server, mail server, and the
machine I do most of my work on (including writing this e-mail). In
other words, it's slow because it's not very powerful and it's
generally real busy. In comparison, my private mapserver machine - a
433MHz Alpha system that I use for development and proprietary work -
takes only a few seconds to generate a map while the slower machine
would take 5 minutes or more.

As compared to a map server such as MapQuest (www.mapquest.com),
MapServer is far better. MapQuest runs ~$50,000 for the server, and an
additional $20,000/year for licensing the map data. It also has many
limitations (such as using port 80 to send/received data from the web
server - a Very Bad Thing(tm) ) and a limited number of platforms on
which it will run. The company I used to work for - I am now self
employed as a consultant - purchased MapQuest last year and continues
to have problems with it to this day. I paid no money for MapServer
and had a couple of operational sites (including my private one) up
and running with no problems (other than my own scripting mistakes ;)
within a week after I compiled the code.

My private site has the entire US and territories (well over 10GB of
map data) online with database support for dynamic map content using
MapServer and MapScript. All the map data was aquired for free and is
current as of 1998.

PGA