performance with different data formats

[Mark Adams]

Howard, thanks for the detailed response. I've added further comments
and questions inline:

>Have you looked at implementing FastCGI

I forgot to mention that we had implemented fastcgi on the mapserver
server. However, we haven't noticed much or any performance improvement
from this. Probably this means we're not doing something right, but
there is little of no documentation to guide us. We can tell that PHP is
running with fastcgi because multiple instances of PHP get created etc -
but how can you know if mapserver is going through fastcgi and if the
connections are being pooled? (I'm assuming, based on the performance we
have, that connections are not being pooled in our case.)

>Is the server across the room or across the country  

We're using a "typical" configuration, where the database server is a
separate box from the web server. In this case they are on the same
network. Running queries through desktop tools to these databases is
fast.

>Using FastCGI to cache the connection will probably bring this draw
time
>(ie, zoomed in, small amounts of data and taking advantage of spatial
> indexes) fairly close to the shapefile one.
 
Again, we have fastcgi implemented for PHP on the web server, and our
mapserver build supports it, but how do we actually get mapserver to use
it??

>I think the MapServer CGI wizards on this list would know how to have
>MapServer send back XML for a query request. 
 
Bart's email suggested using the WFS interface and filter encoding to
get back an XML response. Unfortunately changing our application to
systematically use WFS even when the data is local would be a big
programming effort for us at this time. Also, it seems a bit of a hack
to have to do this?

Based on this response, it seems like our best bet at this point is to
concentrate on getting more out of fastcgi. Are there any documentation
resources we could access for this?

Again, thanks for the support.


------------------------------
Mark Adams
General Manager, Ottawa Office
DPRA Canada
440 Laurier Ave W
Suite 200
Ottawa, ON K1R 7X6
Phone: 613.782.2326
Fax: 613.782.2228
Email: mark.adams at dpra.com