[gdal-dev] Are these WFS issues worth filing tickets?

[Even Rouault]

> 
> I am speaking as one who is running a WFS server. It does not make me
> happy that users can use MAXFEATURES if the default is that it is not used.
> I have more than 50 featureTypes, several of them containing a few hundred
> thousand features and the biggest one has 1.2 million polygons. I do not
> use maxFeatures on the server side because a certain point layer with
> 800000 features is reasonable for unrestricted getFeature. Still my tiny
> server is spending nearly 15 minutes for sending it out.
> Doing "ogrinfo -al -so" for my server means reading approximately 500
> megabytes of data through the web and the ogrinfo result is still broken
> because some feature types get truncated due to timeout after 15 minutes.
> 
> I know that I must be ready to take this because I have decided to run an
> open WFS service and anybody can make such requests it they wish. However,
> I am not sure if this should be the default behaviour of GDAL. I would
> rather see that folks should be active before they hurt my service and
> other users with GDAL.
> 
> How about setting MAXFEATURES to, let's say, at maximum 5000 by default?
> By comparison, GDAL WFS driver itself seems to use only 100 features as a
> default page size if PagingAllowed is selected.

I don't know. Someone that pastes the bare GetFeature request without a 
MAXFEATURES in his web browser will also make suffer your server. It is both a 
legitimate use case in some situations and a potential situation of denial of 
service in others. I also guess that if you add your server as a WFS 
datasource into QGIS and you add a layer in your map, it will try to fetch all 
the features.

I don't want to deny there is a problem when issuing ogrinfo, but I'm not sure 
that setting a default MAXFEATURES on client side is appropriate. The issue is 
more with GetExtent() and the fact that the reported extent in GetCapabilities 
is reported as WGS84 and not in the default SRS, or that the values are 
sometimes junk.

> 
> For those who do not know, ogrinfo wants to read the whole feature type so
> it can calculate the exact bounds of the dataset.  Data are not stored and
> if user selects to fetch the data for local use another getFeature must be
> fired.

Not true. The result of the GetFeature is stored in RAM (if you must download 
500 MB then I hope you have enough RAM) and reused for all the next calls to 
the OGR API, until it gets invalidated by a change/setting of 
spatial/attribute filter. I've verified that GetFeature was emitted only once 
with a ogrinfo -al on a layer.

> 
> -Jukka Rahkonen-_______________________________________________
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