[mapserver-dev] More Performance

[Steve Lime]

This sounds like a great opportunity to collaborate. We all want to go fast and each project
would push the other. Andrea mentioned in Victoria that they would make their test framework
available but I've never been able to find it on their site. Might Andrea be interested in that?

As for labeling. Does the label cache processing have an impact? Could try BITMAP vs TTF fonts
and TTF with and without the labelcache.

Steve

>>> On 5/12/2008 at 2:17 PM, in message
<30fe546d0805121217n33217949ue308e0dbe42aa40d at mail.gmail.com>, "Paul Ramsey"
<pramsey at cleverelephant.ca> wrote:
> I don't have an environment, I'm just taking the info from Andrea. The
> effect of loading a font is definitely noticeable... my
> small-map-on-large-file (no labels) case draws faster than the simple
> draw-50-states (state name labels) case, and the difference is the
> font loading. The curl init overhead is there too, though I see now
> drilling lower into it that it is specific to curl-with-ssl,
> initializing the SSL. Regardless, something that is removable for a
> few ms gain.
> 
> No details on the use cases, I'm afraid. Andrea sent me his test map,
> but it's really just a simple shapes with colors and labels, no
> selectivity case.  He is trying to build a performance testing
> framework that he can use to regress geoserver over time, to ensure
> new development doesn't destroy performance. It's all HTTP based, so
> we could use the same infrastructure.
> 
> P.
> 
> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Steve Lime <Steve.Lime at dnr.state.mn.us> 
> wrote:
>> Do you have a GeoServer/MapServer test environment setup? I'd really like to 
> get one
>> in place. It's impossible to know how fast or slow MapServer is with out it. 
> I'm assuming
>> Andrea has one since he's still testing head-to-head.
>>
>> Are the various use cases detailed some place?
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> Thanks for the Shark tip, hadn't heard of that one.
>>
>>>>> On 5/12/2008 at 1:50 PM, in message
>> <30fe546d0805121150t765a77bl80ecc5ab3092070d at mail.gmail.com>, "Paul Ramsey"
>> <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca> wrote:
>>> Andrea Aime pointed out that Geoserver is still running about 3-times
>>> as fast as Mapserver in some use cases, which has prompted me to
>>> discover Shark (note to developers on OS/X, learn to run Shark).
>>>
>>> Among the things Shark tells me is that the epsg configuration file
>>> remains the biggest (avoidable, but non-obvious) performance issue,
>>> potentially hogging huge amounts of resources, since the projections
>>> are loaded even for layers that aren't being rendered.  Even worse,
>>> it's a performance issue that fcgi doesn't fix, since the loading
>>> happens in msLoadMap.
>>>
>>> Another thing Shark tells me is that we are burning resources in
>>> curl_global_init (called from msHTTPInit via msHTTPInitRequestObj)
>>> even when there are no WMS or WFS layers defined.  This is eating
>>> about 5% of the total cycles, on a fairly well-tuned map file, and
>>> could be fixed.
>>>
>>> Finally, the biggest single resource muncher in this small-easy-map
>>> case is loading the font file.  This could be an artefact of the OS/X
>>> font loading, or it could be generic. It looks like gd has a font
>>> cache, so perhaps this goes away in FCGI.  I guess that should be my
>>> next test, because if it doesn't go away it's a big win in the FCGI
>>> case to make it go away.
>>>
>>> P.
>>
>>