[OSM-dev] all things to all people

[SteveC]

some thoughts on the export tab

yes, it's wonderful and it helps starving babies in africa

but do we really have the resources to serve arbitrary data to people?  
I've noticed the tile server taking a nose dive (and api calls  
actuall) in speed recently  and I thought it was the bandwidth from  
various locations. But, it may be that the export magic is partially  
happening on that box?

Anecdotally I've heard of a few people hammering the export tab for  
data. This is exactly why we don't ship WMS and WFS. It's why tiles  
are good and limited bounding box requests from the map call are good.  
We will never satisfy the arbitrary data requests for the export tab  
or WMS etc as there will always be more wanted. Adding an arbitrary  
output format just adds another arbitrary format on to it, making it  
more computationally intensive.

Really, the existing boxes should be throwing out as many tiles and  
API calls as possible. We should buy a new box for export and it  
shouldn't be a priority in terms of memory, disk, uptime etc.

Best

Steve