On 08/11/2011 22:27, Yves Jacolin (free) wrote:


It seems there was a performance issue with this files. I though using a lot of
small ECW files was not a good practice. Am I wrong?


Yves

my experience is that making Mapserver (via GDAL) reading lots of small ECW files becomes quite inefficient. I would say having more than maybe 50 or 100 files to be read for one Mapserver request starts to slow down the response time of Mapserver. Geotiff with overview files I found a bit better in this respect, but still suboptimal. ECW works well for very large single files, having them even with several 10's of GB will not cause any problems.

If you have frequent updates of the single files then merging the files into few large ones might not be a feasible option. I would then try to use Geotiff with overviews, it should be at least a bit better than the ECW. Automatically converting the ECW files to Geotiff is done quickley. Regarding the required space, Geotiff with overviews need ~5 to 15 times more disc space, depending on the ECW compression rate.

If you need to display the image layer already at very low scales (hence requiring many files to read) then a single merged low-resolution file with ~10-20% resolution (and with overviews) as active layer for low scales would help quite much. Then only when the request is at higher scales, the small images are read, but the number of files will be much lower.

OK, this low-resolution files needs to be updated every time you replace some of the ECW files, but it should be much faster to create a 10% resolution file than a full-resolution one. Using high values for "--config GDAL_CACHEMAX" with "gdal_translate" can speed up quite much merging the small files.


armin

_______________________________________________
gdal-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev

Reply via email to