What is Tile Caching?
When it comes to mapping, performance is key! Tile caching is a great way to help with map rendering speed. Instead of having to draw the map from scratch map each time, images that has been previously rendered are stored in a local cache and then rendered from the cache in subsequent requests. Map Suite has many different tile caching options for your specific application needs.
Depending on your application, caching can be done on both the client & server side for web applications or on the file system for Desktop applications. The flexible APIs allows you to easily create multiple tile caches for different purposes. There are several caching strategies, such as prebuilding all of the tile cache ahead of time, only prebuilding the higher zoom levels, or just caching as tiles get built in real-time through the usage of the application or website.
But as you implement your own caching strategy, there are some trade-offs you should consider:
Pros:
Faster performance.
Less server and client resources needed as tiles are rendered once instead of every time.
Allows for more scalability.
Can work in an offline scenario.
Cons
You may lose flexibility in being able to dynamically turn off and on a large number of different layers.
It can be difficult to change rendering of certain layers once a tile cache has been built.
You need to decide how long your cache will be valid for and how to update it if and when your data updates.
Want to see an application using tile caching? Check our online maps here! If you are interested in an evaluation or pre-generating the tiles download the Tile Cache Generator sample.
Summary
We hope today’s post has been helpful. If you have any questions or if you have a topic you would like to learn more about, please email sales@thinkgeo.com or schedule a meeting to talk in person.
About ThinkGeo
We are a GIS software company founded in 2004 and located in Frisco, TX. Our clients are in more than 40 industries including agriculture, energy, transportation, government, engineering, IT, and defense.
We pride ourselves on our excellent service and transparency. ThinkGeo offers a variety of products and services to meet almost any GIS application need. We can even help you develop your next project - anywhere from a few hours of consulting to outsourcing an entire project. To learn more, email us at sales@thinkgeo.com, or call us direct at 1-214-449-0330.
