Mapserver on Linux vs Windows

[Ed McNierney]

Tim -

Sounds like a good plan.  The biggest variable (assuming the hardware is the same) is the layout of your data sources.  It's important to think those through to get the best performance.

The other thing to keep in mind is where your shop's expertise lies.  Do you have equal skills and experience with both operating systems?  If not, it is likely to be a good idea to stick with what you know.  That's how I generally advise users who ask "should I use Windows or Linux"?  I have yet to see an apples-to-apples comparison that showed any significant difference between the two operating systems.  But the effort and expense associated with learning or trying to manage an OS you don't know probably outweigh any potential performance differences.

     - Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
Phone: +1 (978) 251-4242
Fax: +1 (978) 251-1396
ed at topozone.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Bowden
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 6:18 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Mapserver on Linux vs Windows

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 07:59 -0500, Ed McNierney wrote:
> Tim -
> 
> "neither windows or linux were optimised" 
> 
> But doesn't that largely invalidate the test?  

Yes and no.  This was the first round of testing (done before I joined the team) designed to point the direction in which our efforts should be focused.  It was functional as much as performance testing.  Our client (large govt dept) specified open source where possible & ogc compliance, hence mapserver and geoserver were selected for testing. Both were tested on windows and linux.  Geoserver suffered from stability and accuracy issues under heavy load.  We used jserver to ramp up the load till it broke.  Mapserver in the end didn't break, just got bogged down when the load was too heavy.  OGC compliance was poor with both (at least as far as we were able to do the tests).

We are currently doing a new round of testing focused on ms (geoserver was dropped when our earlier test results were confirmed) with everything optimised to identify outstanding issues (of which there are a few).  We will probably be able to publish a summary of our testing if our client gives permission.

Tim Bowden

> It's very easy to set up poorly-tuned versions of Windows or Linux.  If you simply install both systems out-of-the-box, you're comparing apples and oranges.  This is especially true if you're comparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Windows XP Pro, a desktop operating system!  XP Pro is most certainly not tuned out-of-the-box to be a server platform.
> 
> If you have actual test data it would be helpful to publish it so others can try to reproduce it.  But I will continue to insist that there is FAR more performance variation in other aspects of the system than in the simple choice of which operating system is used.
> 
> 	- Ed
> 
> Ed McNierney
> President and Chief Mapmaker
> TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
> 73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
> North Chelmsford, MA  01863
> Phone: +1 (978) 251-4242
> Fax: +1 (978) 251-1396
> ed at topozone.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] 
> On Behalf Of tim
> Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 10:08 PM
> To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Mapserver on Linux vs Windows
> 
> 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
--
Mapforge Geospatial
Level 3/ 267 St Georges Tce
Perth 6000
Western Australia