Comparing speed of Web Map Service with GeoServer on ESRI Shapefile and PostGIS

There are several options how to configure Web Map Service using several map servers. GeoServer is one of most popular map servers nowadays. GeoServer is able to read data from several sources. Very popular data source is ESRI Shapefile. It is well documented and most of software for geodata processing is able to read and write data in this format. Another very popular data store is PostgreSQL/PostGIS object-relational database. Both data sources has advantages and disadvantages and user of GeoServer has to decide which one to use. The paper describes comparison of performance of GeoServer Web Map Service when reading data from ESRI Shapefile or from PostgreSQL/PostGIS database