[OSM-dev] running a local server

[Dave Stubbs]

On 02/11/2007, David James <david at djames.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Fri, November 2, 2007 12:06 pm, Andy Allan wrote:
> > On 11/2/07, Keith Sharp <kms at passback.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> 4) What are you using to drive Mapnik to do the rendering?  Does this
> >> automagically create the correct directory hierarchy?
> >
> > A modified version of generate_tiles.py from
> > http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/mapnik/generate_tiles.
> > py - yep, it creates tiles in the right hierarchy.
>
> I'm not sure this is the appropriate place to ask, and I'm very new to OSM
> this, so this may well be a stupid question - what drives the choice
> whether to use Mapnik or Osmarender for a local server? (If this is a FAQ,
> please just point me at an appropriate webpage somewhere.)

Osmarender is a general purpose tool for creating SVG vector graphics
files from OSM data... not anything to do with tiles or slippy maps on
it's own. But it's used by the tiles at home project as the rendering
engine.

Tiles at home and the mapnik/postgres/+scripts are basically two
different tool chains which do a similar job. Other than the different
styles the main differences are:

 - t at h uses data straight from the OSM DB server whereas mapnik
requires importing an osm into postgresql first. When doing the whole
world this means that t at h can be more up-to-date with changes, where
as mapnik has to wait for the planet dump for it's import (once a
week)
 - t at h uses way more resources to render, and is much slower. You
couldn't realistically use osmarender to produce real-time rendering
of tiles, but mapnik is fast enough to do this, and requires much less
memory to run.

t at h for the whole world requires many people running a client on their
pc to process rerender requests... a bit like seti at home et al
mapnik for the whole world runs on a single server which attempts
on-the-fly rendering if it's not too loaded.

For a small area either will probably be manageable on a single
server, but personally i'd use mapnik as it's so much faster and
friendly to your RAM.