Cacheing Tiles for WMS

[Brock Anderson]

David,

You might be able to create a precaching script, which requests "tiles" 
from your current mapserver and saves them some place.  Once the tiles 
are fetched, you can setup your tile index on them.  You can automate 
that too.  Then in another map file -- say, "wms_proxy.map" -- you could 
have a layer that uses your tiles index.

This is a decent approach if your WMS clients only need the GetMap 
operation.  Obviously the WMS proxy service won't handle GetFeatureInfo 
or GetCapabilities requests quite as well. 

To help with manage the other requests, you might want to put a script 
with some custom logic in front of both .map files to accept the WMS 
requests.  If it's for GetMap, forward the request to your new proxy map 
URL.  If it's for other operations, forward to your original map URL.

Brock

David Bitner wrote:

>I use a number of WMS services for displaying imagery both for local
>client applications and for inclusion in Mapserver.  A lot of times
>these services are slow or require an additional step of projecting
>that slows them down a lot.
>
>The idea I have is to create an application that sits in front of
>Mapserver (working as a WMS) and takes a request for a map and
>automatically splits the request into tiles that fit a shapefile with
>tiles for different scale ranges.  Once the tiles are there, it would
>then call mapserver on the shapefile index to generate the image to go
>back to the client.  It would basically act much in the same way as
>Ka-Map only completely on the server side.
>
>Has anyone ever done anything like this?  Does what I am proposing
>make any sense?
>
>Any ideas on different ways to implement something like this?
>  
>