Comparing speed of Web Map Service with GeoServer on ESRI Shapefile and PostGIS

Jan Růžička

doi:10.14311/gi.15.1.1

Abstract

There are several options how to configure Web Map Service using several map servers. GeoServer is one of most popular map servers nowadays. GeoServer is able to read data from several sources. Very popular data source is ESRI Shapefile. It is well documented and most of software for geodata processing is able to read and write data in this format. Another very popular data store is PostgreSQL/PostGIS object-relational database. Both data sources has advantages and disadvantages and user of GeoServer has to decide which one to use. The paper describes comparison of performance of GeoServer Web Map Service when reading data from ESRI Shapefile or from PostgreSQL/PostGIS database.

Highlights

Size of the spatial data grows every day and their management is more and more complicated
I can conclude that running Web Map Service with GeoServer on ESRI Shapefile or PostgreSQL/PostGIS are comparable
I can conclude that connecting PostgreSQL/PostGIS via JNDI is slower than connecting PostgreSQL/PostGIS without JNDI

Summary

Introduction

Size of the spatial data grows every day and their management is more and more complicated. Geographic information systems has moved from file based systems via database manged data to distributed data management. All three possible ways how to manage spatial data are still available and used. It is very difficult to store large sized data to single file (for example there are limit about 4GB for ESRI Shapefile format [4]). It is very difficult to perform some queries on large data on single computer. For example Kepka and Ježek mentioned another disadvantage of PostGIS: “PostgreSQL with PostGIS plays a role of the flagship of Open Source RDBMS but there is just limited possibility of simple and fast queries visualisation” [5]. Several advatanges of PostGIS are mentioned for example by Stěhule [12]

Methods

Results

Conclusion