[OSM-dev] Alternative tile webserver needed?

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Sun Apr 29 23:45:21 BST 2007


Stefan de Konink wrote:

> Maybe a *stupid* idea, but why don't we split the tile servers on one
> layer to different servers. So a London based server serves the UK,

Yes, this is a stupid idea (no offense, the idea is stupid, not 
you) because it increases complexity enormously and makes the 
over-all system harder to understand and harder to maintain.

Still, this kind of idea always pops up. I don't know how many 
times I've seen it on Wikipedia's mailing lists.  For a while, 
somebody sponsored a separate server in Korea for the Wikipedias 
in Japanese and Korean.  But coordinating the sysadmin people in 
both places was too hard, so they moved everything back to one 
place in Florida (in September 2006).

I used to get irritated by the "clueless" suggestion to distribute 
server facilities based on geography, but now I'm instead starting 
to see a positive aspect of it: When you have server problems, 
sooner or later somebody will come with a suggestion to distribute 
facilities based on geography.  The people who run the servers had 
better fix any problems before this happens.  It's like the mine 
workers who brought a canary bird to indicate when oxygen was 
running low.  When users start suggesting geographic server 
distribution, that's the equivalent of the canary bird stopping to 
sing.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se




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