Mapserver and threading

[Paul Ramsey]

Shawn,
You might want to play with the FCGI options in Mapserver a bit, if  
you are using PostGIS as a backend (or any database, really) since  
there is a small (in the PostGIS case) or large (in the Oracle)  
connection penalty for each CGI instantiation, and FCGI spreads that  
out over multiple map requests.
Yours,
Paul

On 17-Sep-05, at 9:17 PM, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:

> 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
>