[Tilecache] whether to use tilecache to serve tiles

[Graham Carlyle]

Sorry if this is dumb question I'm relatively new to the whole GIS area
and am just trying to clarify the issues but....

is there a good reason to use tilecache to *serve* your images if:

 * you want to pre-generate all of them
 * you can serve them directly (so say using a TMS style url for serving
them off the filesystem)

I'm not questioning whether to use tilecache to create the tiles, as its
really handy for slicing & dicing the map images into the appropriate
format.

the alternative being you can serve the images using any webserver (so
without needing mod_python/mod_wsgi/cgi support) or say use amazon s3
directly

perhaps the performance improvements of not going via python are
marginal (i suspect not) but at least it simplifies the production
infrastructure requirements (one less thing to break/configure).

i can't see benefits in the WMS url format itself for pre-created tiles.

cheers,
Graham