AWC PDF: performance optimization [1 day]

[perrygeo]

There are several things we can do to improve the speed of the pdf output, all related to the google maps API

• smaller images, esp. for the overview map
• caching map images (hash the URL and save the file locally? )

Finally, if we really want to speed things up (but complicate the code a bit):

• Instead of requesting the images in sequence, make the http requests asynchronously. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4962808/asynchronous-http-calls-in-python

[perrygeo]

Here's a good example of using thread pools for IO-bound processes like http requests:

https://medium.com/building-things-on-the-internet/40e9b2b36148