Request a Download
The ECW SDK 3.3 and the ECW SDK 3.3 Source Code are made available for download on an as-needed basis, after consultation with the product manager, Mr. Paul Beaty. To request a download, please contact by e-mail Mr. Paul Beaty, paul.beaty@erdas.com, with your name, organization, full address to include country, telephone, and email, and a description of your intended use. Use of the SDK requires advance acknowldgement of a EULA.

We have been forced to remove the direct download link due to numerous, frequent disregard for the attached SDK license terms and therefore ERDAS’ Intellectual Property. This post is not aimed at anyone in particular, but I emplore any potential users to email Paul and he would be happy to provide you the SDK. I just got off the train with the guy and he is eager to talk to anyone on our core technology, including a lot of new functionality available in the upcoming SDK v4 series which contains some pretty exciting stuff, v3.3 is over 3 years old guys!

We understand previous license terms have been somewhat ambiguous for some users, therefore emailing Paul will also ensure your intended use (and thus your organisation) complies with the terms and allow ERDAS to better track the usage throughout the community.

I am sure Paul will update his blog with more information very soon *hint hint* …

So here’s my thought. It might fail miserably; I might get no-one submitting any responses but here goes. If it fails, then there’s always Barcelona i guess and the list

I’d like to propose the following raster challenge to whoever is reading this (eg. you). You do not need to be the software developer on the project, in fact it will be more interesting if there’s both developer and real user feedback!

1. Download the BlueMarble world-topo-bathy-200406-3×86400×43200 (2.2 gb torrent) worldwide series
2. Convert, tile, compress, pyramid, overview, palette the original dataset into whatever format or file composition you’d like. Configure your server accordingly to read the dataset and serve out as an OGC WMS
3. Document the steps used to configure the dataset (hint: reproducible). Include details on the final disk storage and or number/size of files
4. Document your server hardware configuration. Particular emphasis on OS, CPU, Memory and Disk configuration
5. Document your software configuration. This time you’re not bound to prior documentation so developers, go for your life … users, do your best
6. Download the attached JMX plan and reconfigure the server details. Do not modify any other part of the plan apart from Lines 482 to 550
7. Install JMeter if you havent already and execute the plan
   1. jmeter -n -p jmeter.properties -t myserver-bluemarble.xml -l myserver-bluemarble.xml.logs
8. Run the OSGEO Benchmarking summarizer.py
   1. python summarizer.py myserver-bluemarble.xml.logs > myserver-bluemarble.xml.sum
9. Zip the documentation, myserver-bluemarble.xml.logs as well as myserver-bluemarble.xml.sum
10. Email the zip to me at chri…@webmapper.com.au and i’ll update the benchmarking page as soon as they come in

The idea behind this is to remove any ambiguity behind a single person configuring all apps, see if the they scale across different deployments, allow applications to use their “preferred” format and most importantly see whether users can reproduce the results!

This is clearly not going to be a comparative exercise. Even if you dont have a crazy 8/16 core server machine, I’d still urge you to submit the results. The point here is to get as many applications documenting how to squeeze the highest peak performance out of each. Results will not be compared as the platform will never be the same by design … Apple. Meet Orange.

Let the games begin~

ESRI Image Server vs LizardTech Express Server

http://geoinfo1.lib.uidaho.edu/loadtest/ (June 2009)

Not much background info on the test setup in particular the input data … but the Pylot results are available and when compared produce a clear winner in LizardTech at all tests. The following are the throughput achieved at 50 user load. The average response times showed Express Server with ~0.5 sec average compared with ~2.5 seconds with Image Server.

Pursuit of the Perfect Digital Ortho File Format

http://www.igic.org/training/pres/conf/2009/perfectortho.pdf (February 2009)

Although again lacking specific reasoning on how they ran the tests., this one is more centered on desktop performance reading a variety of raster formats. There’s a couple of flaws with the support table, as ECW is in fact supported through Microsoft Office and likewise ESRI Image Server can also read the format after purchasing the required license from ERDAS. I would have liked Larry to list the resulting file sizes but his general consensus of running with 2 formats … Geotiff + JPEG compressed with ECW seems like a common conclusion. People seem to forget however that as soon as you introduce enterprise image serving capabilities, the output formats caters for the common request to be able to open in MS Paint or MS Word. I would love to see someone try to open a 700mb JPEG Compressed GeoTIFF in Paint without waiting a very, very long time

Overall though, ECW achieved very good performance in many of the tests with Geotiff winning some large scale tests, presumably when it was requesting 1 reasonably sized geotiff tile

]]> http://blog.webmapper.com.au/2009/12/23/on-the-hunt-for-some-more-benchmarks/feed/ 3 http://blog.webmapper.com.au/2009/12/16/benchmarks-updated/ http://blog.webmapper.com.au/2009/12/16/benchmarks-updated/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:07:33 +0000 Chris Tweedie http://blog.webmapper.com.au/?p=336 Small update,

1. Added a new ECW 256px tile test
2. Added a new ECW reprojection test
3. Added some more info on my mapguide config problems

I’m still keen for someone to verify my numbers. It would be nice to know whether I’m alone in the universe or not even if the setup is different ..

1. Tests extended from just TIF and ECW to TIF, ECW, JP2, MrSID, TIF Tiled, TIF Internal Pyramid, TIF External Pyramid
2. Platform changed from RHEL to Windows Server 2008 x64
3. Increased the threads from 1,10,20,40 to 1,10,20,40,80,150.
4. Hardware increased from a 4 core to 8 core server
5. Analysed throughput not only by input format, but by output WMS Format as well. 8bit PNG vs 24 bit PNG vs JPEG vs GIF
6. Added ERDAS Apollo to the mix along with Mapserver and Geoserver (Deegree and Mapguide was with very limited success … I’ll add these later)

I will endeavour to update the page with new results as there is no question further tuning could be applied. I am not going to comment specifically on the results, as I want to leave the interpretation up to you.

Look out for more performance tests in the coming days..

Enjoy!

If you are getting something like the following in postgresql.log on Windows or are just tearing your hair out wondering why the service that was working before is no longer starting …

2009-12-04 09:05:37 WSTLOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
FATAL:  could not reattach to shared memory (key=240, addr=02690000): 487
2009-12-04 09:05:38 WSTLOG:  autovacuum launcher started
2009-12-04 09:05:38 WSTLOG:  background writer process (PID 9712) exited with exit code 1
2009-12-04 09:05:38 WSTLOG:  terminating any other active server processes
2009-12-04 09:05:38 WSTLOG:  all server processes terminated; reinitializing
2009-12-04 09:05:48 WSTFATAL:  pre-existing shared memory block is still in use
2009-12-04 09:05:48 WSTHINT:  Check if there are any old server processes still running, and terminate them.

To reliably fix things for me anyway,

1. Delete postmaster.opts or postmaster.pid (if they exist) in your postgres data dir
2. Kill the pg_ctl.exe process (if running)
3. Start the postgres service

Success!

This offer also extends to anyone else at Foss4g who may draw similar conclusions for ERDAS not participating in the event. I’m easy to spot in a crowd

I have never been fond of this mythical Opensource vs Commercial divide in the spatial industry; even when I was exclusively using opensource software. Mapserver is no different from a commercially competitive point of view than ESRI products.

Bruce,

Lets set the record straight here. We were invited, but declined. There is nothing more to it.

I will be at FOSS4G on Thursday and Friday on the CCIP booth. Swing by and I will sit down and show you whatever you seem to think we are hiding?

The FOSS4G benchmarks are a great starting point and I would like to think we can be involved next year. I really hope customers do much more by way of due diligence in selecting enterprise software than just some benchmark results.

Lets not forget that we are not the only ones not competing in the event. Mapguide, Deegree, Mapnik, Cubewerx, Mapinfo, Oracle, Cadcorp, Manifold  … the list goes on (notice, there is no delineation between OS vs Commercial here). There is no conspiracy here mate and I’d be happy to show you.

Look forward to seeing you next week.

Regards,

Chris Tweedie
ERDAS Australia

Now, where did that unicorn go and my car with that rocket booster …

First up, I have resigned from my position at Landgate starting December 1. Its been a great four years working with all sorts of industry and government personnel around Australia but its time to go. Landgate really is an innovative land information provider so if you are interested in a “bleeding edge” position specialising in spatial web service delivery, the job has now been advertised on Seek.com.au. I’m not aware of anything else in the government sector like this in Australia so get writing as it would be great to know a solid candidate will fill my rather large shoes

It is with no surprise then that i have accepted a new position at ERDAS to be based in Brisbane in the new year. ERDAS’ recent aquisitions and alignment towards strong OGC support has provided sufficent interest for me to join the team to dabble, tweak, prod and spread their internet solutions around Asia/Pacific. Watch this space!

Many will know much of my time over the years has been spent on the SLIP spatial data infrastructure in Western Australia. Its kinda sad to walk away from it, but its at a state now that I am  confident the system will continue to grow as demand keeps increasing. Its time to hand over the reigns, so to speak. If you have no idea about the project, please check it out. Its very much a world leading project, not because its a new idea, but because we’ve actually deployed a system across a wide range of sectors. Its with great pleasure to announce then that in the last week we have been awarded both the WA Premiers award and the Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award for Spatially Enabled Government which is great to be formally recognised in the community. While I wasn’t successful in the Young Professional category, i’ve still got a few more years to apply before i hit 35 Kudos to my offsider, Patrick Fitzgerald for picking up the Student of the year for two years running

In less exciting news, I am currently transitioning domains (again). It became clear this year that an address like http://chris.narx.net simply caused people to think i was American (a little too often for my liking). The current webmapper.com.au will be updated soon to yet another domain but the move will be transparent but the old address will still redirect automatically. So just to confirm, no I do not do consulting in the US, but thanks for the emails!

It certainly won’t be the end of me and this blog. It appears i might have even more time to write more frequently at ERDAS with would be great. Change is a good thing, and I look forward to see where we end up in the next 12 months

Chris

From the press release,

CarbonArc PRO 1.6 eliminates barriers to SDI usability through advanced SOA-based discovery, analysis, exploitation, transaction management and security tools for OGC SDI – directly from the ESRI ArcGIS desktop.

Instead of just regurgitating the release, the key question that always gets asked is … doesn’t ESRI ArcGIS already do all this?

Its a tricky question to answer because while on paper i could say, “Yes it does!”, in reality there are just so many annoying quirks and missing features, it quickly becomes a nightmare integrating SDI features into your normal ArcGIS workflow (which is what this is all about, right?).  So with fingers crossed, lets dive right in and see what i can find in 5 minutes flat …

The Good

1. Well laid out and robust tool set which delivers fully functional WMS/WFS/WFST/WCS capabilities … with no mucking about required!. The thing just works.
2. Very easy export to Shapefile tool
3. Full featured filter encoding support … no black magic, user has full control
4. Full access to the query string for all service types
5. Caching of features / images when saving to project files

The Bad

1. GML Integration will always be difficult given its a completely new ArcGIS feature source, but its still not up to the average users expectations I dont think. There is no attribute table, the features are independant of pretty much all other ArcGIS functionality so you are really left with GAIA functionality squished into an ArcGIS window.
2. Web services request headers are devoid of any accept-encoding headers. I’m still pondering the choice of Expect: 100 requests … but i’m sure there’s a good reason in the depths of HTTP …
3. The exclusive tool for CubeWerx “Identity Management Service” seems a bit strange as i’m not aware of any services that use this technology? Shoot me a link if i missed something!
4. Lack of support for any WMS LegendGraphics. Users can choose from multiple Styles, but theres no way to actually view legend information which is a bit disappointing
5. In the full minute spent trying, i wasnt able to get the WFST support working … i could get as far as the schema but as soon as i’d try to insert a feature the thing would just bail out.

I’m beginning to think the best suggestion would be to somehow merge CarbonArc WFS functionality with an automated export to shape on each filter response. This would allow excellent SDI WFS support, while still giving full ESRI ArcGIS functionality to users without having to reinvent the wheel (for things like the edit system). With the WMS/WCS support pretty solid, i think getting the balance of WFS right could mean the difference between a very promising product and one I would recommend to everyone using our platform.

Thoughts?

A few more suggestions to improve things further (for anyone listening~) …

1. Add HTTP compression handling. Huge performance gains with the transfer of features and its really a no brainer to enable in any http library.
2. I am by no means a “Mapinfo Master” ™, but it would be great to enable an automated WFS Table refresh especially if you are retrieving features based on CURRENT_MAPPER.  I guess the CTRL+F5 shortcut makes it easy-ish … but i certainly found myself wondering whether i had retrieved the features or not and ended up just sending unnecessary requests.
3. If a transaction is successful, give me some kind of alert. Alerting only when it fails does not instill much confidence whether my long edit session went through or not (even after refreshing)
4. It would be fantastic to add helpful warning messages when performance drops. I’d imagine most users would skim over the maxfeatures and column / row filters and just add the layer.

If the first request takes 5 minutes and Mapinfo tells me i just retrieved 4000 poly features totalling 10mb and it kindly directed me to the WFS how-to, i’d be more inclined to see what the filtering options were all about

So there’s no WFS1.1 support … but i’m still trying to get my head around handling the axis order issue and are more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie … at least for the moment. I only had time to test against our Geoserver installs, but it certainly seems tested against many other apps including Cadcorp, Ionic & Mapinfo. Geoserver specific here, but the advanced security in 1.6.x works very well with the bundled support for basic authentication.

Finally…