ArcIMS vs. MapServer - Some Hard Data

Here is some information I found on a list serve comparing simple map generation performance for 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. Here are some details:

We have created a test application that can be used on ArcIMS and now MapServer. Both MapServer and ArcIMS are on the same server (Windows 2000 server) with the same data (200 MB vector data in shapefiles).

MapServer is wrapped in a c#/dotnet webservice. The API to the webservice is ArcXML so both solutions have the same interface. The test application used six simultaneous clients requested 500 maps each in total 3000 maps.

RESULTS:

MapServer
Total time: 7.47 min (467 sec 0.1566 sec/map (image), 385 maps/min)
Max delay for a map: 2.93 sec
Min delay for a map: 0.14 sec
Average for a map (with six simultaneous clients): 0.96 sec

ArcIMS
Total time: 12.08 min (728 sec 0.2426 sec/map (image), 247 maps/min)
Max delay for a map: 3.94sec
Min delay for a map: 0.12 sec
Average for a map (with six simultaneous clients): 1.49 sec