Mapserver damn slow

[Gregor Mosheh]

> The first thingwhich helped me a lot was PROCESSING 
> "CLOSE_CONNECTION=DEFER".. That hit me upto 10req/s (see in relation 
> with the other figure only ;)).

Hey neat. I'd heard conflicting reports, minimizing the impact of that 
processing directive. Nice to hear that it was significant for your case.


> I didn't optimize the postgres db so far.

Again, can't say without details.

* Optimizing the DB is a huge step, if it's of any significant size: 
indexes, cluster, analyze and vacuum, etc. My company consults on such 
things if you don't get a complete-enough answer from the list; and 
PostGIS and PostgreSQL have mailing lists as well.

* If it's completely static data, you'll find that shapefiles 
(especially shptree'd and/or sortshp'd ones) often perform faster than 
PostGIS. This also frees you from the database cruft, if you're not the 
DBA sort.

* Examine your classes and layers, and see what you can speed up there; 
remember that classes are processed for every feature, in order, for the 
first match, so putting the most-frequently-matched classes at the top 
can save some CPU time, if you can still achieve the classifications you 
want by doing so.

And I'm pretty sure there've been at least a half-dozen threads on the 
mailing list's archives on the topic of optiizing mapserver's 
performance. Try searching the archives or Googling, and see what comes 
up, perhaps?

-- 
Gregor Mosheh / Greg Allensworth
System Administrator, HostGIS cartographic development & hosting services
http://www.HostGIS.com/

"Remember that no one cares if you can back up,
  only if you can restore." - AMANDA