Testing OGC Web Feature and Coverage Service performance: Towards efficient delivery of geospatial data

OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) specifica- tions allow interoperable access to distributed geospatial data made available through spa- tial data infrastructures (SDIs). To ensure that a service is sufficiently responsive to ful- fill users' expectations and requirements, performance of services must be measured and monitored to track latencies, bottlenecks, and errors that may negatively influence its over- all quality. Despite the importance of data retrieval and access, little research has been published on this topic and mostly concentrates on the usability of services when integrat- ing distributed data sources. Considering these issues, this paper extends and validates the FOSS4G approach to measure the server-side performance of different WFS and WCS services provided by various software implementations; and provides guidance to data providers looking to improve the quality of their services. Our results show that perfor- mance of tested implementations is generally satisfactory and memory tuning/data and storage optimization are essential to handle increased efficiency and reliability of services.

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