[Mapserver-users] Mapserver Newbie Quests

[Tyler Mitchell]

> I have set up Mapserver Win Binaries (4.2 beta2) on a Windows 2000 
> Server Machine, because of the ECW Support of GDAL. The Server only 
> should Serve a bunch of ECW Color Images per OGC Service at a good 
> performance. So I created a tile index over the Fotos (~10000 
> Mosaics in endconfig) as shapefile. This works fine but there are 
> also a lot of problems, I can not solve with my mapserver skills.
> 
> Problem 1: Can I use a tile index, served by a PostGIS Database? Is 
> that faster (more perormance)?

I think that your shape file tile index is probably going to be faster, in 
theory, than PostGIS.  The nature of MapServer is that PostGIS calls have 
to go through a couple more levels to get your answer, whereas shape files 
are bit more simple.

> Problem 2: When I zoom out too much, mapserver needs exponentially 
> more time to process the input ecw´s to a output jpeg. How can I 
> tune that best? (Pyramids? How?)

ECW's, by nature, have a type of pyramids already.  It is not clear 
whether or not GDAL takes complete advantage of this, I know it was an 
issue earlier on - a good question for the GDAL mailing list.  There are 
several folks, including myself, using this capability - but I'm not 
pushing the limits as you appear to be.

> Problem 3: On the Server, there are running lots of instances of 
> mapserv.exe, which I can´t kill, because "Acces denied!" (I´m root 
> on that machine). COuld there be some misconfiguration?

Perhaps restarting the web server would help.  I assume it's not an Apache 
web server :)

> Problem 4: I´m testing this configuration (mapserver + ecw Imagery +
> tile index), to find a method to serve very large raster data for 
> our ArcIMS Services, ArcGIS Applications and AutoCAD Clients. Do you
> think, there might be a better solution? For my part, mapserver 
> could do this good (if I could admin it perfectly), but maybe there 
> is a much better solution.

I think targetting OGC WMS would probably be your best bet - sounds like 
you are on the right track!

Tyler