Benchmarking Geospatial Buffer Operations: Impact of File Formats, Spatial Tools, and Parallelization

This repository contains code, benchmark scripts, and execution records evaluating the **computational performance, file size optimization, and parallel scaling of vector buffer operations** on large point datasets. While vector buffering is conceptually an "embarrassingly parallel" operation, practical performance is heavily constrained by underlying file I/O overheads, geometry segment density, single-threaded CPU bottlenecks, and spatial data driver limits. This study benchmarks these operational trade-offs across QGIS, GeoPandas, and Dask-GeoPandas using ESRI Shapefile, GeoPackage, and GeoParquet.