[mapserver-users] Displaying very large shapefiles

[Puneet Kishor]

Armin,

Just a quick observation...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Armin Burger [mailto:armin.burger at territoriumonline.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 5:47 AM
> To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
> Subject: [mapserver-users] Displaying very large shapefiles
> 
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I tried to display a really huge shapefile with 2.5 million 
> polygons (the
> .shp file has about 450 MB). I used the 'shptree' to 
> calculate the spatial
> index. But also with the index file (.qix) it takes several minutes to

[snip]

> handle shapefiles with too many features? The index file 
> itself has 14 MB.
> 

a 14 Mb index file for a 450 Mb shapefile seems to be too small an index
file. For example, I have a 156 Mb shapefile (state and county roads). It
was slow as a dog. Then I indexed it and shptree created a 38 Mb index file.
It is now blazingly fast.

Try reindexing with different parameters... maybe the indexing is not
optimal at all.

You are right. Nothing should take "minutes" in today's web age. If it does,
you have to either improve it or do it some other way.

pk/