[mapserver-users] Web Server Tricks... Kind of Off Topic

[Pericles S. Nacionales]

Lot's of interesting reply on this one but what I would recommend is a
combination of two previous posts.  First, Tyler Mitchell mentioned WMS.
Yeah, use that for your raster datasets.  For vector datasets, I would
then suggest importing them into a geodatabase (PostGIS) and connecting
to that database from your slower web server.  This way, you can still
use "normal" MapServer functionalities on the "local" layers.

So, 
1. set a WMS server app on your fast machine and add all your raster
layers there.  
2. On the same machine, install PostgreSQL and PostGIS, and convert your
shapefiles to a PostGIS database (there's a utility included in
PostGIS). 
3. Create a WMS client application on your slow machine and add all the
layers from your WMS server app.
4. Add your PostGIS database/s as layers to the WMS application.
5. Do anything else you'd like.
6. Let us know how it works.

This unfinished application works almost like that:
http://arbutus.gis.umn.edu/cambodia/.  The raster layers come from a WMS
server app that resides on a Windows 2000 machine (hw: Dell Optiplex
Gx1, 400mhz PII, 256Mb RAM) with Apache (sorry, I gave up on IIS a long
time ago) while the vector layers reside on the local machine (arbutus)
running Linux 2.4 (hw: custom, AMD k6-2 500Mhz, 384Mb RAM).  I did this
while fooling around with the WMS stuff.  This was going to be my
masters project...

G'day!
Perry N.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
[mailto:owner-mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu] On Behalf Of Puneet
Kishor
Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2002 7:12 PM
To: 'Hankley, Chip'; MapServer List (E-mail)
Subject: RE: [mapserver-users] Web Server Tricks... Kind of Off Topic

would be cool, wouldn't it! but, unless mapserver can be made into a
daemon
(or a service), this really is not easy. 

think about it...

a user request comes to your dummy (slowpoke) web server. The webserver
determines this is a ms request...

one way, of course, would be to simply pass the request to a different
webserver... both, in Apache and IIS (and probably every other webserver
on
earth except perhaps the 10 line ultramicro one somewhere) you can
easily
forward a request to another computer based on a number of parameters.
but
what's the point of this... you may as well have that "other" server
published and not have the users go to your slowpoke server...

what you want is that the grunt work of ripping through the mountains of
shape files or other data is done by a chunky backbox with gobs of ram
and
solid-state harddisks for storage, no? so, the slowpoke server passes
the
params to your backbox which constructs the requisite image and dumps it
into a storage that is url-accessible by the slowpoke.

now, the way ms is right now, it is just a program (a great one, but
just a
program nonetheless). it runs only when poked by either the webserver
(cgi)
or perl/php (cgi). you need it to be like a server itself (then it will
really live up to the last two syllables in its name), fully threaded
n'all,
perhaps forking, just like Apache is, in its own memory space, etc. 

Perhaps it could be... SDL is the man for to comment on that. 

Even better if it could be a mod_mapserver a la mod_perl, all compiled
and
loaded within Apache itself, but that is another story...

pk/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hankley, Chip [mailto:Chip.Hankley at GASAI.Com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2002 4:44 PM
> To: MapServer List (E-mail)
> Subject: [mapserver-users] Web Server Tricks... Kind of Off Topic
> 
> 
> I am by no means a guru at configuring / working out web 
> server hardware /
> networking issues... and could use a little guidance.
> 
> Our main webserver is pretty much a dog. We're running a 200 MHz dual
> processor server w/ win2K and IIS... it handles a number of 
> things for our
> company (besides mapserver)... and it is S L O W (i know... 200 MHz,
> Win2K... big part of the problem).
> 
> Anyway... my options are limited b/c of internal politics and 
> the like - so
> Linux is out, as well as my own dedicated server.
> 
> What I'm wondering is if there is some way to "pass-through" 
> my mapserver
> requests to a more powerful box within the organization. For 
> instance, a MS
> request would come in, and instead of being processed on that 
> server, the
> actual mapserver work (the process of rendering the image 
> from the raw GIS
> data) would occur on another more powerful machine, and then the image
> either would be passed back for service to the client, or 
> would be read
> directly from that machine. Is such a thing possible? What 
> would be the
> performance implications of such a trick?
> 
> I think this is kind of how MO IMS and ArcIMS work in that 
> there is a "Map
> Server" that runs as a service... not necessarily on the web server.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Chip Hankley
>