[mapserver-users] How to make MapServer WMS super fast?

[Benoît Andrieu]

Hi !

What about TileCache with a memcached store ?
http://tilecache.org/

It won't speed up MapServer responses but the user should be faster served.

I have never used it.

Benoît Andrieu
bea at ixsea.com
benoit.andrieu at gmail.com



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Warmerdam" <warmerdam at pobox.com>
To: "Rahkonen Jukka" <Jukka.Rahkonen at mmmtike.fi>
Cc: <mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] How to make MapServer WMS super fast?


> Rahkonen Jukka wrote:
>> Hi,
>>  Are there any effective tricks for making MapServer to Top-Fuel class? 
>> We have now a typical ms4w installation on a rather good server platform 
>> with SCSI drives and 2 four-core processors running on Windows 2003 
>> server. Our images are tiled, uncompressed geotiffs with overviews, 
>> vector sample data set is shapefile with shptree index.  I have a 
>> shortened epsg file and my mapfile is extra short. Bandwith is not the 
>> limit. We are getting out now about 450 orthoimage pictures per minute 
>> (size 500 by 500 pixels) and 550 pictures from the vector layer in png24 
>> image format.  I consider that rather good, but we are required to reach 
>> 20 images per second, thus 1200 images per minute or 0.05 seconds per 
>> image.  I wonder if anybody has tuned MapServer that far.
>>  I am willing to try however exotic solutions to reach the 20 WMS output 
>> images/second goal if somebody could suggest me what to try next.  In our 
>> system there seems to be about 0.1 second ballast with WMS getMap 
>> requests and I cannot get any faster response even if I try with on empty 
>> data layer with nothing to render.  Have anybody tried to keep mapfile, 
>> epsg-file or even tileindex files in RAM drive? Having about 20 parallel 
>> users seems to be optimal for our server and if I drive just WMS 
>> getCapabilities request against my mapfile I can get about 1300 responses 
>> per minute.  That leads me to think that 1200 rendered images per minute 
>> might be possible to reach with optimal set-up.
>
> Jukka,
>
> I'd suggest you come to the TO Code Sprint and help us fine tune 
> performance!
>
>   http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Toronto_Code_Sprint_2009
>
> More seriously, I have had the impression that some of the "everything
> but the kitchen sink" distributions like MS4W, FWTools and OSGeo4W have
> somewhat significant startup overhead - possibly due to the number of
> DLLs being loaded at startup.  You might look into a custom building
> a "lite" version of mapserver and see if that helps.
>
> As someone else noted, fastcgi will also let you skip such startup
> costs on a per request basis.
>
> But honestly, why not just buy another damn server?  Isn't your time
> worth something!
>
> Best regards,
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, 
> warmerdam at pobox.com
> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
> and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent
>
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