In WMS cache systems, metatiling consists on requesting larger tiles than ‘regular’ tile size – for us, 256×256 pixels -, and then splitting them into tiles of regular size. TileCache has this feature, and it can be used to dramatically speed up the WMS cache seeding process.

In the first section we will see how to enable TileCache metatiling in a Debian server. In the second section we will see a benchmark showing that speed up in the seeding process, and a simple method to get the best metatile size. Finally, in the third section we see how to avoid two frequent errors when using an instance of MapServer as Web Map Service (WMS) server.

1. Enabling metatiling

In TileCache metatiling is enabled in the configuration file – tilecache.cfg – and must be done in every layer we want to take advantage of this feature. Below a configuration file snippet is shown:

[cache]
type=Disk
base=/path/to/wms-cache/directory/

[municipalities]
debug=yes
type=WMSLayer
url=http://myserver/sdi-lugo?service=WMS&transparent=true
extension=png
size=256,256
bbox=580000,4688000,680000,4850000
layers=municipios
srs=EPSG:23029
extent_type=loose
maxResolution=285
levels=10
metaTile=yes
metaSize=15,15

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