Mapserver on Linux vs Windows

[tim]

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 22:39 +0100, Sture Dingsøyr wrote:
> Hi there
> 
> We have a server running Mapserver on Linux (Red Hat 8). Is is used to generate maps, mainly from shapefiles. But also some layers from Postgis/WMS. To do this we use PHP and MapScrip...
> 
> We are now considering the possibility to port our solution from Linux to Windows, mainly du to the fact that maintaining new versions of Mapserver on Windows are quite easy with the pre-built binary package that exists for Windows (no compiling is needed).
> 
> Does anybody have any experience on how a Mapserver solution works on Windows compared to Linux. I am mainly thinking about speed and performance? 
> 
> Does Mapserver work faster on Linux? 
> 
> Regards Sture

We have been testing mapserver on both linux (rhel 3.x) and windows (xp
pro) for performance testing.  I can't remember the exact results
(someone else on our team did the actual testing) but on high end
hardware (Dell dual xeon 3ghz 4gb ram) ms on linux approached 50% higher
load than on windows.  I'll have to check next week just how the test
were done but the decision was clearly in favour of linux.  I do know
that neither windows or linux were optimised and the feeling was we
could extend the linux performance considerably (by doing things like
not running X etc).

HTH,
Tim Bowden
-- 
Mapforge Geospatial
Level 3/ 267 St Georges Tce
Perth 6000
Western Australia