[Openstreetmap-dev] Ideas to lower server resources (was: The bigger picture)

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,

moved to dev.


>> If donations don't get enought money, we need to change the software so
>> it use not that much resources until donations are enough. ;-)
>
> Please do!  What changes would you make, and can you make the case
> that those features aren't necessary?

A very good approach that greatly worked in the past to those things is
distribute the whole effort. Networks like Gnutella exist, because people
want the thing they provide and because all people are willing to
contribute to the (MASSIVE!) need of ressources as bandwidth and CPU
power.

Well, I think this is a very long-term goal and some kind of a "last
effort", since building good heavy distributed systems are much much more
complex than building good centralized servers.
If the overhead we need in programming power only for maintain the
distribution is larger than the resources we need to maintain a server,
this is no solution.


Caches. We need good caches! As example for the own people at home. If
people can just download an exe (or aptitude a package) and have a local
cache of the tile server, I think this can improve performance by several
magitudes.
However, I did not profile this, so maybe I am wrong here, but still it
sounds like a good mid-term solution to me.


Last time I looked at the ruby code, I was able to speed up the map.rb -
requests by more than 30% with some simple changes (considering the very
basic and possible wrong measurements I made ;( ). I think there is still
great potential to just optimize the server to be not that resource
hungry. This is the short-term solution, we have ;)


I think better profiling is an important goal. Especally when we are
planning to change something (other hardware, other database software,
other server programming language, other protocol API etc.) we need the
posibility to compare the results. I can only speak for myself, but this
is the main reason, I am currently not interested in doing performance
things: I am unsure whether this has any impact or may just worse the
whole thing.
Anyone with profiling experience around?


Ciao, Imi.