[OpenLayers-Users] Loadza Markers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 02:35:31PM +0000, Jerry O'Sullivan wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I am thinking of placing alot of markers (100,000 +) on my openalyers map.
> My questions are
> 
> 1) Will it be able to handle it?

No.

Browsers can't handle moving around a DOM with more than a few hundred
elements at once. I highly recommend figuring out a way to limit
yourself to under 500 markers (Firefox) or 50 markers (IE6).

One way to do this is to put the points in a geo-database (PostGIS) and
use a WMS server (MapServer, GeoServer, Mapnik, etc.) to serve WMS
images.

> Obviously these will be zoom layered so less than 100 probably will be
> stored at any time

I'm confused. You say 100,000 markers to a map... do you actually mean
100,000 data points, which you choose from depending on the viewable
area? That's certainly doable. We do that with MetaCarta search results:
we have 20 million documents, but we never show more than a couple
hundred at once. At that point, it depends how you plan to select which
markers to view in a given area. 

I don't know if that helps answer your question? Can you explain a bit
more of what you want? 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta