Earlier this Last year, in June, Don Meltz wrote an interesting blog “ArcGIS vs QGIS Clipping Contest Rematch” where he let compete ArcGIS and Quantum GIS in a clipping contest. The benchmark contest data set in question is a 878MB ZIP file (ContourClipTest.zip with the (guessed) EPSG Code 2260 – NAD83 / New York East (ftUS)). The blog page gained a lot of comments, even from ESRI since some ArcGIS versions crashed on this test data set.

Find below the various timings compiled from the blog and the comments:

Proprietary software

Software	Processing time	Hardware/Software
ArcGIS 9.3	crash after 1h 9min: ERROR 999999: Error executing function. Invalid Topology [4gb file limit.] Failed to execute (Clip)	unknown
ArcGIS 10.0	crash likewise	unknown
ArcGIS 10.1	ESRI promise to calculate it in 34 seconds in this updated version (did anyone test?)	unknown
GlobalMapper (version?)	30 mins	unknown
GlobalMapper v11.02	49 sec	Windows XP w/ 3.5GB RAM
Manifold 8 (64bit)	31 min	Windows XP64 16 gb. RAM and 2.33 GHz

Note: The two GlobalMapper results are a bit funny, perhaps always minutes?

Free and Open Source Software

Software	Processing time	Hardware/Software
Quantum GIS (version?; Simple features)	4-5 min	unknown
GRASS GIS 7 (topological GIS)	5 min	Dell PowerEdge 2950 from 2008, Intel Xeon 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM
gvSIG	to be done
PostGIS	to be done

Notes: Hope volunteers will test this also on gvSIG and PostGIS (and other FOSSGIS)! Please report…