MapCache: The Fast Tiling Server From The MapServer Project

Thomas Bonfort (Terriscope EURL)

12:00 on Friday 20th September (in Session 35, starting at 11:30 a.m., Sir Clive Granger Building: A41)

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Description: MapCache is a fast and featureful library allowing webservers to efficiently serve and manipulate tiles, and transparently speedup access to existing WMS instances.
Abstract:

MapCache is a new member in the family of tile caching servers. It aims to be simple to install and configure (no need for the intermediate glue such as mod-python, mod-wsgi or fastcgi), to be (very) fast (written in C and running as a native module under apache or nginx, or as a standalone fastcgi instance ), and to be capable (services WMTS, googlemaps, virtualearth, KML, TMS, WMS). When acting as a WMS server, it will also respond to untiled requests, by merging its cached tiles vertically (multiple layers) and/or horizontally. Multiple cache backends are included, allowing tiles to be stored and retrieved from file based databases (sqlite, mbtiles, berkeley-db), memcached instances, or even directly from tiled TIFF files. Support of dimensions allows storing multiple versions of a tileset, and time based requests can be dynamically served by interpreting and reassembling entries matching the requested time interval. MapCache can also be used to transparently speedup existing WMS instances, by intercepting getmap requests that can be served by tiles, and proxying all other requests to the original WMS server. Along with an overview of MapCache's functionalities, this presentation will also address real-world usecases and recommended configurations.