Performance hints please

[Stephen Davies]

G'day all.

Does anybody have a howto on Mapserver performance enhancement?

My particular environment of interest is a relatively small set of 
geometries in a PostGIS database and a collection of geotiff aerial 
photography images onto which I overlay the geometries.

The geometries are fully indexed, relatively static and vacuum analyzed 
every night.

One of the options that users have is to request a "movie" of up to 20 
frames; each of which consists of a background raster plus up to about 
five circular geometries, about five points and maybe ten other 
lines/polygons.

The amount of geometry involved is so small, the bottleneck has to be 
the raster processing. The images are 2m/pixel and are typically 20 - 
150 Mb each. The frame extents include most if not all of an image so 
tiling does not seem relevant.

I have specified 80% JPEG as the output to minimise final image size and 
this seems successful (at least in terms of size and hence download 
time)

I am looking for ways to reduce the time taken in the image generation 
phase.

TIA,
Stephen Davies

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