[Mapserver-users] server specifications

[Ed McNierney]

Ryan -

Here are a few things to think about:

1. We run MapServer on both Windows and on Linux, on similar machines.  I have no evidence that either operating system is perceptibly faster or slower than the other, and I know of no reason why one would run faster.  Use the operating system your server administrators know how to use.  If they know both, let them have a shouting match to decide <g>.

2. You need to understand your client load and goals before you can spec the hardware.  That is, you can't tell if the hardware is fast enough until you define precisely what "fast enough" is supposed to mean.  How many simultaneous users?  What response time requirement?  I'm sure you'll say you don't know all that, but you need to make some guesses so you can get a baseline.

3. Your Web server will run multiple instances of MapServer/MapScript as needed to serve simultaneous requests.  If there are two CPUs available, two simultaneous requests will go faster.  One request will go a bit faster (sometimes) on two CPUs because the OS and MapServer can run in parallel.  However, MapServer is not multithreaded and will not take advantage of multiple processors when running a single instance.

4. You should probably have lots of RAM in any event, for OS file caching and to support multiple MapServer instances.

5. The biggest performance issues, if you're serving lots of raster data, involve your data organization and disk subsystem.  SCSI RAID disk arrays are certainly faster than other systems, but they're quite expensive.  In our experience IDE RAID arrays can be quite good if they're configured as read-only data stores - mixing read and write operations will hurt you a lot.  Be sure your raster data is well-understood, and well-organized - appropriately tiled, indexed, and with overviews if appropriate.

	- 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: Grant, Ryan [mailto:rgrant at nrcan.gc.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 4:55 PM
To: Mapserver Users (E-mail)
Subject: [Mapserver-users] server specifications


Hey all,

We are looking to purchase a server to act as a dedicated Mapserver/OGC
services provider. We run Mapserver with the PHP/Mapscript module, and are
wondering what sort of system would work best in this configuration. Would
you recommend Linux over Windows? We have been running Mapserver on a
windows machine, but we hear that it will run faster on Linux as a service.
Is it a big jump to recompile it to work on Linux?  Also, what would you
recommend as the minimum hardware specs, with respect to processors and RAM?
Can Mapserver make use of dual processors if configured properly, and is the
price worth the performance gain? Some of our raster data gets as large as
100mb per image if that needs to be taken into consideration.

Thanks in advance,

Ryan Grant
Research Assistant/Programmer
GSC - Pacific Division
Natural Resources Canada
(604) 666-7526
rgrant at nrcan.gc.ca

_______________________________________________
Mapserver-users mailing list
Mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
http://lists.gis.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users