[Qgis-developer] reading times shapes over network difference

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

Hi Devs,

somebody pointed me to the following observation:

Opening a shapefile (375555 features, 156Mb dbf) *over a network* 
connections between two remote locations (VPN SDSL connection 10Mbps) 
seems te show HUGE differences between QGIS and other desktop gis's (all 
Windows):

Opening the shape untill the full rendering:
( 375555 features, dbf 68 MB):
QGIS 1.6	2'31"
QGIS 1.8	2'30"
ArcGIS 9.3.1	0'18"
ArcGIS 10.1	0'17"
DivaGIS		0'24"

( 132733 features, dbf 162 MB):
QGIS 1.6	5'07"
QGIS 1.8	5'00"
ArcGIS 9.3.1	0'07"
ArcGIS 10.1	0'07"
DivaGIS		0'07"

When you open the same files locally QGIS is as fast as the rest.

Does somebody else see this behaviour?

Does somebody have an explanation for this?

I haven't checked/debugged into it myself, but one explanation of 
somebody was that maybe arc* and diva* only fetch the shp file first, to 
be able to render as fast as possible, and only get the dbf file when 
needed (or maybe in a different thread or so).

Is that possible?

Thanks for any input.

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde