Member Avatar for sohanw

I want to compare web map serving tools for response time when serving a variety of maps. Can you direct me to a free or if not proprietary tool to use for the tool comparison.

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For comparing map servers by response time you need an HTTP load-test approach that mimics how map clients request tiles (many small concurrent requests, different zoom levels, cache-warm vs cache-cold). asked the right question; while named a mapping provider, a provider is not the benchmarking tool you need, and ’s “search” suggestion won’t replace controlled tests.

Good free/open-source tools to run those tests:

  • Apache JMeter — build repeatable test plans, CSV parameterization, run headless for automation.
  • wrk — lightweight, high-concurrency, Lua scripting for cycling through tile URL lists.
  • Locust — Python-based user-behavior scripting; easy to model parallel tile downloads per user.
  • ApacheBench (ab) — simple baseline tests.
  • WebPageTest — real-browser waterfalls and per-resource timing for client-side behavior.

Practical workflow to get comparable numbers:

  1. Create representative tile URL lists (z/x/y patterns, raster vs vector, different layers).
  2. Warm the cache (one pass) to separate cache-hit vs cache-miss behavior.
  3. Run sanity single-request tests, then ramp concurrency (capture p50/p95/p99 latencies, throughput, error rate).
  4. Monitor server CPU, memory, disk IO, DB queries and cache hit ratio during runs.
  5. Repeat tests on identical hardware/network configs and report percentiles (not just averages).

Example quick commands:

ab -n 1000 -c 50 "http://tileserver/12/1100/745.png"

wrk -t12 -c400 -d30s -s tile_script.lua http://tileserver/

Cautions: do not stress production without permission; run generators from the same network or use distributed runners to avoid client-side bottlenecks; emulate browser parallelism (multiple simultaneous tile downloads); and separate render time (server-side) from transfer time (network) when interpreting results.

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Member Avatar for infinique

I would just recommend Google Maps since it's free and so widely used.

Member Avatar for sohanw

I would just recommend Google Maps since it's free and so widely used.

Thank you for the reply.
But my need is a comparison tool.
Thank you again

Member Avatar for articlewriter1

Have you tried a SEARCH??? I do not remember hearing about such a tool!!

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