[gdal-dev] Q: on gdalwarp of ecw file

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Jan Hartmann <j.l.h.hartmann <at> uva.nl> writes:


>     Hi Even, are there any
>       benchmarks to compare (uncompressed) gtif with the three formats
>       above? My production maps are always tiled to 2000*2000 pixels,
>       all zoomlevels precomputed. Very efficient with uncompresssed
>       gtif, but they take lots of space. How much slower are these
>       formats?
>       Jan 

Hi,

Here are some 6 years old numbers from some Mapserver tests:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.mapserver.user/23540

The speed feels now rather slow compared with the feeling I have from our recent
services but differences may be alike. Or then they are not because drivers are
not the same anymore and new hardware can suit better for one than for another.

We are using aerial images mostly as JPEG compressed tiffs now but I have not
bothered to do any timings lately. They save 90-95% of disk space, they are not
much slower and users have not noticed the difference in quality so for us the
choice was pretty easy.

It is usually too simplified to say that some file format is slower that some
other because there are so many other factors also in play. JPEG200O is an
infamous example. It is a complicated file format and many software are very
slow with big geospatial JPEG2000 images, but there are applications which can
handle them very fast. Sluggish software does not necessarily mean that the
format itself is slow. Six year old numbers 270/120/24 images per minute for
tiff, ECW, and JPG2000 with Kakadu prove mainly that there must have been
something wrong in how Kakadu and GDAL were working together at that time.

You can get the best information about the real speed in your environment by
making your own tests. Others will praise you later if you make controlled tests
and publish the arrangement and results somewhere for future references.
Unfortunately I do not remember myself how I did my own tests but I believe I
was using FWTools 2.0.4 binaries.