[Mapserver-users] Map broker?

[Ed McNierney]

Krzysztof -

Your assumption is not correct.  I - and others on this list - use
MapServer every day with data sets much larger than yours.  As a
specific shapefile example, I have an application that serves GDT's
Dynamap/2000 street maps of the United States.  It's 9 gigabytes of
shapefiles, so it's 30 times larger than your data set, and it has been
in production running quite nicely for a year and a half.

There are certainly some things that can be done (and are being worked
towards) for better map serving, you need to think carefully about
performance tuning.  For example, "map-buffering" will keep objects in
memory.  That's great in some respects, but it means there's less memory
available for other things.  Will that cause swapping?  What actually is
being buffered?  If it's the shapefile data itself, isn't the filesystem
also doing disk caching?  How do the two interact?

Perhaps you should begin with a side-by-side performance comparison of
MapInfo MapXtreme and MapServer.  That will give you an idea of which
one to start modifying <g>.

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
Phone: (978) 251-4242  Fax: (978) 251-1396
ed at topozone.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Krzysztof Chodak [mailto:k.chodak at autoguard.pl] 
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 7:55 AM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [Mapserver-users] Map broker?

Has anyone of You any experience with MapServer and large amount of 
data. By large amount of data I take approximately 300MB of shapefiles. 
I think that MapServer's current architecture is not suitable for this 
use (when taking into account couple hits per second).

I got some knowledge of MapInfo MapXtreme - there is a mechanism of map 
objects broker which is preinitializing map objects and "renting" them 
on request. Don't you think that it would be great to have such 
"map-buffering" mechanism? I'm inspecting MapServer's code to find some 
clues wether it is hard to do it or not...

Krzysztof Chodak

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