At 7:58 AM -0500 8/23/06, Mark Adams wrote:
Howard, thanks for the detailed response. I've added further comments
and questions inline:
Have you looked at implementing FastCGI
I forgot to mention that we had implemented fastcgi on the mapserver
server. However, we haven't noticed much or any performance improvement
from this. Probably this means we're not doing something right, but
there is little of no documentation to guide us. We can tell that PHP is
running with fastcgi because multiple instances of PHP get created etc -
but how can you know if mapserver is going through fastcgi and if the
connections are being pooled? (I'm assuming, based on the performance we
have, that connections are not being pooled in our case.)
Ensure that 'mapserv -v' shows SUPPORTS=FASTCGI. Set your
FastCgiConfig in your apache configuration to be something similar to
step 3 of the FastCGI howto. And the most important bit is ensure
that 'PROCESSING="CLOSE_CONNECTION=DEFER" is set on the MAP, or else
MapServer will not do *any* connection pooling (FastCGI or not).
I think the MapServer CGI wizards on this list would know how to have
MapServer send back XML for a query request.
Bart's email suggested using the WFS interface and filter encoding to
get back an XML response. Unfortunately changing our application to
systematically use WFS even when the data is local would be a big
programming effort for us at this time. Also, it seems a bit of a hack
to have to do this?
I'm not an expert with this, but I also think you might be able to do
something with MapServer's templating engine. I'm hoping others with
more expertise jump in here and explain an approach to take. I'll
refrain from interjecting my personal opinion on whether or not WFS
is a hack or not ;)
Based on this response, it seems like our best bet at this point is to
concentrate on getting more out of fastcgi. Are there any documentation
resources we could access for this?
<http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/fastcgi> is the current doc.
You also might try to catch me or Frank on IRC for quick response to
specific questions. If anyone else with FastCGI experience knows of
information that needs to be added to the document, let Frank, Jeff
McKenna, or I know and we'll make sure to add it.
Howard
