[mapserver-users] Enhancing MapServer performance with GPUs

[Paul Ramsey]

Non-trivial places time can be spent:

- CGI startup (if you aren't using FastCGI)
- reading layers (if you have a lot of them! it's only a ms or two per
layer, but if you have 100 layers...)
- reading data
- rendering data
- compressing output images (more than you'd expect)

I'd expect GPU assisted rendering to be a win only for a narrow
minority of cases, it's not a predominant time sink as often as one
would expect. Plus for all the speed once you have the GPU chain set
up, the setting up of the GPU can be costly, and for a CGI program
like MapServer, that's a big deal.

P


On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Even Rouault
<even.rouault at mines-paris.org> wrote:
> Le dimanche 15 juin 2014 23:50:05, Visit Hirankitti a écrit :
>> Dear list memers,
>>
>> My name is Visit, a newbie of this forum. I have been using MapServer for
>> at least 4 years now on many research projects. It has served my research
>> projects quite well.
>>
>> Recently I am using MapServer to develop a real-world enterprise web
>> application.
>> I am developing a web-based GIS application using MapServer to serve
>> thousands of users, and one of overheads of the system is on the map
>> rendering provided by MapServer.
>>
>> At the moment the server I use to run MapServer doesn't have a graphic card
>> (i.e. GPUs), but I wonder if I really want high performance of
>> map-rendering from MapServer, can a graphic card (i.e. GPUs) equipped with
>> the server enhance MapServer's map rendering speed and hence improve its
>> map service speed?
>>
>> As a graphic card contains hundreds of GPU cores, e.g. NVDIA CUDA platform,
>> and each core can compute and draw polygons in parallel, so I think this
>> can improve the speed of map rendering (if used with MapServer)
>> substantially. Do I understand this correctly?
>
> You'll have to profile where the time is exactly spent in MapServer. If it is
> in pulling data from sources, or in the rendering part itself. There's a
> OpenGL backend available in recent MapServer versions that could potentially
> speed up rendering, but it is likely a bit experimental and might need more
> work.
>
>>
>> Thanks for your advice in advance,
>>
>> Visit Hirankitti Ph.D.
>>
>> Intelligent Communication and Transportation Lab
>> King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
>> Thailand
>
> --
> Geospatial professional services
> http://even.rouault.free.fr/services.html
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