Tobin Bradley has posted about the speed difference between ArcIMS and Mapserver. “Although I can’t rerun their test to validate the results, I can anecdotally support them - I have certainly found MapServer to perform significantly faster than ArcIMS, and that experience has been echoed to me by other parties. The study found MapServer to be about 30% faster than ArcIMS, which sounds about right.” Wow, 30% faster! That gets your attention, but when looking at the posted results in his post (he says he found them on a listserv, but Google wasn’t kind to me today) you see on average that UMN MapServer is half a second quicker than ArcIMS in the performed test. Not exactly anything to be amazed about and probably not measurable by most people and certainly not significant.
I won’t argue with anyone who says UMN MapServer is fast because I’ve seen it, but in our real world applications we haven’t noticed any difference between our applications running on ArcIMS vs those running on MapServer. Benchmarking something like that is a complete waste of our time, plus I don’t own a stopwatch. The bigger issue with the speed of both GIS server applications is how and where your data is installed. It is easy to get caught up on these speed claims with server software and they are fun for posting to Digg, but in the real world there are way too many variables to worry about 1/2 a second waiting for a map to be served.
ArcIMS does has some issues, but I don’t consider speed to be one of them.
15 responses so far ↓
1
TomServo
// Feb 14, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Our little town serves up both ArcIMS and Mapserver projects and I will agree, speed isn’t ArcIMS’ problem. I loved your post on the Microsoft Management Console. If ArcIMS had that, it would be about perfect for our use (well besides cost).
2
Sean Gillies
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Half a second doesn’t matter? Maybe that was true back in the 20th century, but it’s not true anymore.
3
Soxsfan
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I say this is all hogwash anyway. Both are slow in the wrong hands.
If a developer knows what they are doing, both ArcIMS and MapServer are about the same.
4
David Davis
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:16 pm
I can’t find this data online either. I’ll be honest, I haven’t had too much experience with Mapserver, but I consider ArcIMS to be very fast as long as you don’t use those slow HTML viewers.
5
hobu
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Some hard numbers re: MapServer vs. ArcIMS in WMS producing environments with ArcSDE by Refractions Research can be found here.
6
Valerio Alesi
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Do peoples think that ArcIMS is slow? Me thinks it fastest if directions followed.
7
James Fee
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Thanks Hobu. That was good.
8
Larry
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:26 pm
I agree with James. ArcIMS has its issues, but speed hasn’t been one in our implementation. We’ve had bigger issues with our SDE and local data storage than we have with the actual serving speed.
I wish ArcIMS was as easy to administer as Mapserver. A MMC plugin would be very helpful. The current tools are so archaic.
That PPT had ArcIMS 4.01 in it. Has 9.0 gotten quicker than 4.0?
9
hobu
// Feb 14, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I would guess that ArcIMS 9.x has seen quite a few improvements since the 4.x series. The interesting thing to me on that powerpoint is the shapes of the graphs. They are both shaped similarly except for the data projection case. That was kind of surprising, but it has probably been fixed.
My experience with both is that data organization matters the most. Indexes and the use of generalized geometries in situations where you don’t need a lot of detail have a lot of impact. The performance of both seems to be highly sensitive to the person who set them up and how haphazardly they did it
10
Chris Tweedie
// Feb 14, 2006 at 6:10 pm
James, you must love opening up these can of worms
My POV? It will always come down to the operator. I have spoken to a few people who conversely claim ArcIMS blows mapserver out of the water, only to find that they deployed 3x spatial servers to do it.
Trying to find common ground in terms of deployment of the app and the datasource is also always going to be difficult. Even shapefiles which you would think would be a good start, have different index implementations.
11
James Fee
// Feb 14, 2006 at 9:18 pm
What? I’ve never even seen a pot to stir before.
12
Morten
// Feb 16, 2006 at 1:49 am
It would be nice to get hold on the test-setup so one could verify it as well, or even extend this test to include some of the other mapservers on the market.
13
tim waters
// Feb 17, 2006 at 4:12 am
I would also like to see the details of the test-setup, and in particular how different hardware can affect performance. Compare, for example, the two running on a PIII with 1ghz of ram, and then compare the two running on the latest top end server.
14
Dol Momphotez
// May 8, 2006 at 9:18 am
i have made a development on mapserver, but right now i have a big problem i cant´not make juxtaposition of layers, if somebody can help me telling me if it´s posible to make this whit mapserver please help me.
15
Nelson
// Oct 10, 2008 at 8:40 am
The speed difference isn’t huge… the price is….
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