advice on applicability

[James Reid]

hi - my organisation is currently looking at options for delivering
(viewing/panning/zoom) black and white raster maps. There are c. 500,000
individual images ranging in size from a few hundred K to 8-9 Mb.

teh nature of teh maps is that teh same area could be covered by more than
one  image and several images for teh same area may exist.

if I use tileindex to pint to the images and the index shapefile has several
polys for the same area pointing to differnt images, is that permissible and
if so is it possible to configure mapserver to select a specific one?

we'd also apprciate pointers to some case studies or stats from other sites
using mapserver to serve up lots of images, especially wrt to load balancing
and performance.

all comments appreciated : )