MapServer performance issue drawing gmap map

[dmorissette]

Paul brought up an interesting question: why is this script so slow?

<?php
dl( 'php_mapscript_44.so' );
$oMap = ms_newMapObj("/home/daniel/proj/msapps/gmap/htdocs/gmap75.map");
$oImg = $oMap->draw();
$szURL = $oImg->saveWebImage();
echo "<img src=$szURL>";
?>

real    0m0.794s
user    0m0.583s
sys     0m0.033s

I seem to remember that GMap was drawing its map in more or less the same time
on very slow hardware 3-4 years ago. The times above are on a relatively recent
and fast Linux machine. Is MapServer becoming fat and slow?

Assigned to Julien to try to shed some light on this. Perhaps start by comparing
with performance of older versions, and also try some profiling.