[Xastir] painfully slow raster map performance

[Kevin Ratcliff]

Greetings,

First let me preface this that I love Xastir and it's capabilities. I
don't know what my SAR team would do without it. Please don't take the
below as a criticism. I'm very appreciative of all the hard work that
the developers put into Xastir.

Now for my problem: raster maps seem painfully slow to zoom in/out and
pan. This is on a laptop with a dual-core processor, 4GB RAM, and maps
stored on an SSD drive. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is at, but
it takes a long time to move around on the map. I don't have this
issue with other mapping applications on the same computer (qgis, and
Maptech/MyTopo Terrain Navigator in wine). Qgis opens the same maps
very quickly and I can pan/zoom around without any trouble.

I don't have any issue with the speed of vector maps (shapefiles, in my case).

Is the issue something that I've configured something incorrectly, or
are raster maps in Xastir normally slow?

Is it a library that Xastir uses that causes the slowness, or code in
Xastir itself?

One idea I had for a workaround was to use postgresql+postgis with
Xastir to put the positions into a database, and then load those
positions into qgis for my raster mapping needs. The issue I ran into
was I couldn't get the postgis stuff to work quite right because I'm a
complete newbie to it, so I'm not sure if the problems I encountered
were all my fault or just incomplete database support in Xastir.

Another idea I had was to use aprskml connected to the local server
port along with Google Earth. This works quite well when I have a good
Internet connection for the GE maps to load, but not so great in the
middle of the wilderness!

If anyone has any suggestions for my issue I'm all ears.

Developers, keep up the good work!

Thanks.

Kevin
KB9MQU