[Mapserver-users] Hosting mapserver

[Ed McNierney]

Steve -

You're asking an extremely complicated question.  If you want the real answer, you'll need to do some stress/load testing with examples of the actual data set you're dealing with.

The organization and structure of your data sets have a MAJOR impact on MapServer performance, so it's impossible to answer the question without knowing a lot about the application.

Here are some things to think about.  I'm not trying to be difficult, but your question is basically unanswerable without a lot more research and/or testing.

You can break these into two categories - factors which affect the response time for a single map request, and factors which affect the response time for multiple simultaneous map requests.

Single Map Request
====== === =======

How large are your data sets?  If the data is such that it's mostly or entirely cached in RAM, that's very good.  How many layers do you use?  Are the vector layers indexed (shptree)?  If you're using raster layers, are they sampled appropriately?  Will users zoom in and out on your data or will they mostly be scrolling around at one zoom scale?  Have you carefully set minscale and maxscale settings so you're not drawing too much data?

Simultaneous Requests
============ ========

What is MapServer's working set to create a single map (this will depend on how it's built and on your data)?  The more memory a single MapServer instance requires, the fewer simultaneous users you can support before you start swapping.  Are you running on a single IDE drive?  If so, you're going to get into trouble quickly, and if you start swapping you're doomed.  Is this a dedicated machine running only MapServer and associated HTML pages?

Is this application on a system we can look at?  If so, you'll probably get better input and comments.

	- 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: Steve Young [mailto:steve at sierraclubbc.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 2:08 PM
To: Mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [Mapserver-users] Hosting mapserver


Hi,

I'm planning to launch a new mapserver site in a couple of weeks. I have it
running on RH 7.2, Apache 1.3x Mapserver 3.6. The box is a Duron 950 with
256Mb RAM and 7200rpm ide drive. When it's just me on the site most images
pop up in less than a second. I'd like to give the client some idea how many
simultaneous users the site can comfortably support. Does anyone have a
similar set up running?

TIA,

Steve


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