>Our preferred environment will be Linux and using the CGI version of >MapServer as this is extremeley robust (well done to all involved), is >stateless and has a small memory footprint. Most map layers will be in >either Shape or TAB and we can configure the Tile Indexes etc.
We have tested with comparable country-wise dataset in different data formats (shape files, tab files, postgis database) and hardwares (linux/x86, solaris9/sparc, solaris10/AMDx86), using the CGI version. Linux/x86 (1 CPU PIII ~1 GHz) was quite satisfactory, around 1 sec/map (about 100 maps/min), Solaris/Sparc with 2 CPUs (Sun Fire440) was ~2...3 times slower and Solaris10 on AMD (Sun Fire V20z) was ~3-4 times faster than Linux. Taking price and also high reliability into account I would suggest the new Sun Fire X4200 (or two x2100) servers with AMD cpu-s and Linux or Solaris 10 os, this will be also the fastest you can get and it should be sufficent for 2 M maps/month. But I do not have proper whitepaper about this. Jaak
