Cluster/Supercomputer/HPC variants of Mapserver

[Rick Innis]

>
> We're trying to develop a high-performance mapserver that can cope  
> with the load we're going to be throwing at it!  Currently it takes  
> 298 seconds (on a Mac OSX Server, 3.5 Gb Ram, dual 2Ghz processors)  
> to do what we need done on under 60 seconds!

Biz,

In casual conversation with an Apple systems engineer yesterday, he  
mentioned that in many cases building code with the standard GCC  
flags may not fully exploit the capabilities of the Altivec  
processor. I didn't have an opportunity to discuss this any further,  
and I'm not sure if the OS X build of Mapserver takes this into  
account already, but it may be an avenue worth exploring.

One other thing I've discovered recently in various rounds of testing  
is that OS X's disk I/O performance is slow compared to Linux.  
Apparently the G5 architecture gives higher priority to memory I/O.

	--Rick.