I've been recently inquired for a new project where a large number of geo-referentiated items should be placed on a map. In detail, there is a large dataset of a few hundred thousand equipments (around 0.5 million) that must be represented on a map and searchable on that same map. Each equipment is considered to be a full node with it's own data (manufacturer name, model, year built, ...).
These equipments can be grouped by some criteria, but it may happen that the users request the visibility of a huge quantity of them at the same time.
From my experience with OpenLayers we can use this "grouping" feature to organize them into several layers, but on the other hand every time I have a big number of elements on screen (a few hundred) it gets almost impossible to navigate, pan or zoom, as the system gets really slow. I can not imagine this working with such a huge amount of data points.
Has anyone had an experience with a similar project? and can anyone provide me with some guidance on what may be best approach (modules to use) in this situation?