shptree not faster than no index

[John Bolster]

Hi all,

I'm noticing there doesn't seem to be any difference in speed between having
*.qix files vs. not having them. I'm wondering if I'm doing this right.

My data is from tiger and is in shapefiles. I'm only dealing with county
outlines right now. They are each in a separate folder, each state's
counties are in one state folder. There's a tileindex on them all at the
root of the tree.

I'm displaying a simple map using .../cgi-bin/mapserv?map=demo.map&mode=map.
It's extent is set to show about 4 states of the country, showing all county
outlines. It comes up pretty fast, so I run the page 5 times in a row and
time that with no *.qix files, then build them (on each county file and on
the tileindex) and repeat the test. As near as I can tell the results are
identical.

When I used a larger extent and displayed the whole country of county lines
and did everything else the same I similarly got the same timing either way.

I created the tileindex first and then did shptree afterwards. Does the
sequence make a difference?

I've tried running shptree in all these forms with no change from the
directory where the tileindex is:
find . -name "*.shp" -exec shptree {} \;
find . -name "*.shp" -exec shptree {} 4 \;
find . -name "*.shp" -exec shptree {} 6 \;
find . -name "*.shp" -exec shptree {} 10 \;

Thanks for any hints.

John Bolster