[mapserver-users] Major MapServer Performance Problem on Sun Solaris 10 64bit

[John Westwood]

Hi,

We have been developing an application with MapServer as the backend. We developed it on an SLES Linux box, we are now setting it up on the Sun Solaris 10 production server. Unfortunately, the performance of MapServer on the production machine is very slow, considerably slower than the Linux development machine (which is much less powerful). The performance problem is particularly pronounced when serving vector PostGIS layers (OpenStreetMap), but it is also noticeably slow when serving rasters.

We have tested PostGIS, this is fast and therefore no the problem. I have looked at the MapServer debug file at debug level 5 and this does not reveal much, except that both the total msDrawMap() time and the mapserv request processing time are slow. So, MapServer seems to be slow across the board. The Apache log file also confirms that the MapServer requests are slow.  

Originally, we had MapServer compiled as 64bit and Apache as 32bit, we thought that maybe this could be the problem. So, we compiled Apache for 64bit - but has not made any difference. We are considering using 32bit Apache and 32bit MapServer but we are not sure if it will fix the problem.

Does anybody have any ideas on what the problem could be or how we could go about diagnosing it? We would greatly appreciate any advice.

Regards,

John Westwood
Great Britain Historical GIS Project