About performances

[Benoit Myard]

Hi list,

We are on the process of replacing our custom GIS tools by MapServer
because it offers greater flexibility and more features. We also
appreciate its open approach to the GIS universe and the ability to
integrate it in a wide variety of tools.

We currently work with E00 data which we convert to Arc/Info Vector
Coverage (with AVCE00) but we experience major performance issues.

For a reduced set of data (about 2 MB), MapServer takes up to 15
seconds to render a rather small map (75,000 km²) on a pretty decent
hardware (Sun-Fire-T1000 running Solaris 10). Note that MapServer
doesn't have to reproject the data.

We wonder if the slowness experienced is due to the data format used;
if so, which format would you recommend ?

Also, do you think that using the FastCGI approach would significantly
improve the performances ? I read that FastCGI is good for databases
but not of much use for files geographic databases; is that still
true, and what's current status of FastCGI support in MapServer ?

Could you share performance reports (data formats used, amount of data
available, time to render and hardware specs) with the list so that we
can compare ? Are any of you aware of recent performance benchmarks,
so that we have a reference ?

Do you have any ideas or tips to fasten MapServer besides tiles caching ?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Benoit Myard