[OSM-dev] OSM Database Infrastructure

[SteveC]

Ian

I think the single-server still works very well. It does so by  
ignoring doctrine on postgis and gis extensions and a bunch of scary C  
extensions thought up by Nick Hill and implemented by TomH. jburgess  
is doing similarly scary things with apache modules for shipping out  
tiles.

People have thought about splitting load geographically or otherwise,  
but AFAIK nothing solid has been done.

I've bounced this to the relevant people and the dev list, which you  
should join if you want more discussion.

have fun,

SteveC | steve at asklater.com | http://www.asklater.com/steve/



On 5 Jan 2008, at 20:51, Ian Dees wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Last week I started editing OSM data and found it to be a very  
> interesting and fulfilling experience. Of all the community-driven  
> and open-source projects I've seen, OSM is by far the most  
> interesting and useful.
>
> The reason I'm e-mailing you is to ask about the server and database  
> infrastructure. After showing the project to a couple of my computer  
> science professors, they were surprised that there is one database  
> server that handles such a large load. Has there been any research  
> into splitting the load up between several region-specific database  
> servers? I would think that since editors usually don't need to  
> cross continental boundaries, the data for continents could be split  
> up between several servers, distributing the load among the machines  
> and making the end user experience faster. I would propose that each  
> regional (or "tier 2") server would be the only address allowed to  
> make changes on the global (or "tier 1") server.
>
> I appreciate any thoughts you have on this topic.
>
> Thanks, and happy new year.
>
> -Ian Dees