[Mapserver-users] Mapserver Newbie Quests

[Richard Greenwood]

Tyler Mitchell wrote:

>>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.  

Even if GDAL is using ECW's built-in pyramids, the overhead of opening 
~10000 files would be significant. I'd recommend pyramids. Maybe fewer 
than you would use with tiffs. Patch your images together and down 
sample them.

>>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?

Those are probably instances of mapserv.exe that died. Get the 
"kill.exe" tool from the NT Resource Kit (or Google it).


>>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.

ER Mapper has an ECW Image Web Server. Don't know much about it, but it 
sounds like what you are looking for.

Rich

-- 
Richard Greenwood
www.greenwoodmap.com