[Mapserver-users] Mapserver hardware recomendations.

[Ed McNierney]

Jason -

If you're concerned about performance, the first thing I'd do is lose
the JPEGs, and convert them all to TIFF images.  Otherwise the rest of
the things you've identified for managing your data are good ideas - do
as much as you possibly can to optimize the data layout and usage before
you begin to think about hardware.

Your hardware setup generally looks reasonable.  At TopoZone we serve
about 20 terabytes of imagery and vector data using a similar sort of
platform at much higher traffic rates (but no, it doesn't all fit on one
box <g>).  You would probably benefit, however, from more RAM, depending
on your usage model.  Having more RAM available for working set AND some
left over for disk cache will be helpful unless virtually all your hits
are "random" and not geographically related to one another.

If you will be frequently updating your data set, please remember that
in my experience most ATA RAID controllers see their performance go out
the window when asked to support simultaneous writes and reads.  Don't
try to do much active updating while your server's busy trying to serve
maps.

	- 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: Jason M. Nielsen [mailto:jnielsen at aero-graphics.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 11:33 AM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [Mapserver-users] Mapserver hardware recomendations.

We are planning to put a mapserver together for both external and
internal use.
The data will primarily be composed of rasters. Most of these rasters
will more than likely be 24bit TIFF and JPEG. The raster data alone I
think will start at around 400Gigabytes and could quite possibly grow.
Vector data could potentially become substantial much later on but for
the next couple years I do not see it growing beyond 50-100MB.

Im hoping to increase the speed of the setup through the usual means
such as min/max scale displays, tiled imagery, reduced colors(if
possible), pyramids/rrds and of course trying to optimize the core
imagery resolution for the application.

I dont expect the traffic on this site to be too combersome. Perhaps no
more than a few hundred hits a day at most and probably no more than ten
connections at a time.

I was thinking 1GB of ram, P4 2.8-3.0 or athlon-64, ata-100 main drives
(one for OS and software other for swap etc) with the data sitting on a
ata raid5 that interfaces to the machine via at least a SCSI U160
interface or perhaps firewire.

I will probably put 3 main drives in it. 2 will be the OS/software and
mirrored.
3 will be swap.

All of this I plan to be running under either Redhat 9.0 or Fedora.

Any recommendations on anything with regard to such a setup?

Thanks, Jason.


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