I'm creating a console app in C# that will determine the distance between two points. I've got the program working, but it takes an extremely long time to process it. Here's how it works:

The program retrieves a list of distributors from a sql table. This table has the distributors zipcode, maximum driving time, address, and state in it. The end point is already calculated and added to the route, this happens each time the application is ran for the first time. The system loops through the distributors and compares the route driving time to the distributors maximum driving time (from the table). The loop continues until a distributor is found whose max driving time is less than or equal to the route driving time.

I was wondering if there was a better/quicker way of doing this. My company plans on having a dedicated server that will do all of the mappoint processing on it.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Scott

You'll be glad to hear C# isn't the cause of your problems
I've done similar things in C++, and MapPoint is the one that is sucking cpu - so C# overheards are not relevant.

Two suggestions:

1.) Cache as much as you can. Route finding is the slow link in the chain, as you are probably aware.

2.) Are as-the-crow-flies distances relevant?
Can these be used to prune the more distant routes?
This could be a double improvement - as well as removing some of the route-finding, these longer routes take the most cpu to find!


Richard

Thanks for the reply. I was wondering what type of data should I be caching. Also the "as the crow flies" distances won't work, I have to know the exact driving distance and driving time in this application.

One more thing, is there any way to update the zip codes in MapPoint. I've got some that I know exist but MapPoint cannot retrieve any information on them. Thanks

Scott

No you can't update the zipcodes.

re. "as-the-crow-flies" I was wondering if you could do this as a quick test - eg. not do a proper route test between two locations that are far away, because there's no chance of the driving time being within range.

caching: depends on your application: eg. are particular routes being tested regularly?



Richard