[mapserver-users] Thousands of layers?

[Pushkar Pradhan]

Hi James,
I think it would be better if you use php mapscript/ perl mapscript.
This allows you to turn on/off layers as you wish, so you can:
turn the basic levels when viewing the whole country, then as the user
zooms in into a particular region turn on the detailed layers within that
extent (e.g. streets layers).


> Hello everyone,
>
> I've been using mapserver for about a year now and one of the problems I've
> struggled with is making a detailed map of the United States - down to the
> street level.
>
> I have Shapefiles generated from the 1997 TIGER, broken down by county. I've
> noticed in the mapserver documentation that there is a limit of 50 layers per
> mapfile (incidentally, the define in map.h is set to 100). There are a few
> thousand counties in the US, and consquently I think I need a approximately
> 20,000 shapefiles to represent the different layers for each county.
>
> If I recompile mapserver with MS_MAXLAYERS set higher, how will that affect
> performance? Looking at source it appears that the MS_MAXLAYERS is just used
> to allocate memory for each layer. How does mapserver decide what maps to
> load? I'm assuming it uses the bounding boxes associated with each shapefile
> to determine what file to load? If so, are those read each time mapserver is
> invoxed, or can it have a index file?
>
> Is anybody else using mapserver for this scale? Advice? Am I on the right
> track at all?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -James Jefferson
> Winona, Minnesota
>

-Pushkar S. Pradhan