Hardware

[Gregor Mosheh]

> Hi everybody,
> does exist a document, (in the web), about hardware
> specification for mapserver?

Mapserver itself is just a CGI program, and takes up
very little RAM. It'll run on any reasonably modern
hardware: Some of our test boxes were PII Celerons
with 64 MB of RAM running HostGIS Linux.

Naturally, there are other considerations for your own
needs. Although a low-end PII Celeron will run it, a
high-speed P4 will of course be faster. If you're
running Windows (let alone Mapserver), then a machine
with 64 MB of RAM is torture. If you want a database,
then that's a whole separate animal where all the RAM
you can afford is worthwhile.

In short: The minimum is basically most garage-sale
PCs made in recent history. Your own impatience
dictates getting something as fast as you can afford.
;)


Now, a note on RAM. I had asked about this a few
months ago and thought I'd mention it. MapServer
itself, and Apache with the PHP/MapScript pre-loaded,
still take up very little RAM. My question was
whether, given this low RAM consumption, there would
be a difference between 128 MB of RAM and 1 GB of RAM
(assuming I were not running a database). The answer
was that modern OSs will use all of your spare RAM
aggressively caching files from the disk. Thus, the
extra RAM will make a significant difference, because
the OS can load the shapefile (or whatever) loaded
from RAM cache instead of spinning the hard disk.


--
Gregor Mosheh
System Administrator and Head Programmer
HostGIS, GIS Hosting Solutions for the Global Community
http://www.hostgis.com/


		
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