[mapserver-users] MapServer Performance

[Ed McNierney]

Folks -

I have been very pleased with MapServer performance on a variety of applications.  Good data design is also a very important part of any application.

I have never done head-to-head comparisons with ArcIMS, because I could not afford a copy of ArcIMS.  If anyone has a SPECIFIC project in mind, I'd be happy to help with performance tuning.  There are far too many parameters possible to spend time on a "here's how to totally optimize every conceivable MapServer app on any hardware you like"....

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dylan Keon [mailto:keon at nacse.org]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 1:16 PM
To: 'bwragg at mappingandbeyond.com'
Cc: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] MapServer Performance


I've had the same experience as Dave.  Prior to experimenting with
MapServer I used ArcIMS to develop web-based mapping applications. 
Although ArcIMS offers more features out of the box (buffering, ease of 
setting up a standard interface, etc), it doesn't hold a candle to 
MapServer in terms of speed, certainly not when both are used on similar 
hardware.  I put together a test interface for browsing all Oregon DRGs 
(somewhere around 1900 quads, ~20GB of data).  This was on an old P3 
550MHz box running Linux.  The combination of MapServer, gdaltindex, and 
scale dependency (1:24k DRGs set to MAXSCALE 50000) allow search times 
of about a second when a user navigates around.  Pretty impressive for 
that hardware, in my opinion.

Some listers (e.g., Ed McNierney) are running fast MapServer 
applications against terabytes of data.  Search the list archives and 
you'll find some good info.

-- 
************************************************
  Dylan Keon
  GIS/Database Research Specialist
  Northwest Alliance for Computational
  Science and Engineering (NACSE)
  Oregon State University
  Corvallis, OR 97331
  keon at nacse.org        (541) 737-6608
************************************************

Lowther, David W wrote:
 > Benjamin,
 >
 > I have been using Mapserver for about 2-3 months now. Before that we 
used a
 > CGI app written around MapObjects and at times we played with ArcIMS to
 > compare performance. In my experience, Mapserver FAR FAR FAR outperforms
 > ESRI products. The real shock for me was that I could load a layer of 
55,000
 > parcels into Arcview 3x, turn the layer on, THEN click refresh on my
 > Mapserver page with those same parcels in the map and the Mapserver page
 > returned well before Arcview finished drawing - consistently.
 >
 > I don't know HOW Mapserver is so fast, but it is. So far performance has
 > been equally as good with other vector layers as well as raster 
layers. All
 > this, for free, platform independant.
 >
 > I guess while I am on my grateful box I'll add that the support from this
 > mailing list and the user community in general is outstanding.
 >
 > HUGE thanks to all that make and support Mapserver,
 >
 > Dave Lowther
 > Geo Information Systems
 > University of Oklahoma
 >
 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: Benjamin Wragg [mailto:bwragg at mappingandbeyond.com]
 > Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 9:59 PM
 > To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
 > Subject: [mapserver-users] MapServer Performance
 >
 >
 > Hi Guys,
 >
 > I'm just about to start playing with MapServer a bit, but I was just
 > wondering how the performance is along side some of the other map
 > servers like ArcIMS.
 >
 > Thanks,
 >
 > Benjamin Wragg