Mapserver and threading

[Shawn Wallbridge]

On 17-Sep-05, at 10:00 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> On 9/17/05, Shawn Wallbridge <shawn at synack-hosting.com> wrote:
>
>> I am contemplating the machine I want to run Mapserver on and I am
>> trying to decide between a a couple of machines.
>>
>> Has anyone run Mapserver on a 4+ CPU machine? Does it thread very  
>> well?
>>
>> PostGIS will be running on a different machine (Quad Processor Sun
>> e450 with 4GB of Ram, lots of SCSI disks running Solaris 10).
>>
>
> Shawn,
>
> The common way of running MapServer is as a cgi (either mapserv
> itself, or a mapscript cgi).  In this form, each cgi request will  
> run on
> a single CPU but several requests can be effectively serviced at a
> time.
>
> It is also possible to run MapServer in a multi-threaded way.  I
> would have to say that this is not so widely used, and consequently
> somewhat risky.
>
> So, if you are running as a cgi, then you will be able to support more
> requests on a multi-cpu system than on a single cpu system assuming
> you find things are cpu bound.  Of course, in many cases things are
> really input/output or memory bound in which case the multi-cpus will
> give relatively little benefit.
>
> Best regards,

Thanks, I guess I wasn't thinking, because I _should_ have known  
that ;-)

So the 14 Processor Sun E4000 it is ;-)

shawn