[OSM-dev] Ways with 40k nodes, was: osmosis pgsql schema

[Maarten Deen]

Frederik Ramm wrote:

> This definitely has to stop. We need to (a) find all ways with more than 
> a few thousand nodes and break them down, and (b) educate users that 
> they shouldn't do such evil things. Imagine the poor sod who opens a 
> little rectangle in JOSM just to find he has to wait for ages to 
> download 40k nodes! This slows down so many things.

I've just had the tiles at home client crash on me because of a way of some 4700 
nodes (which wasn't even in the tile itself). Memory consumption went up to 1GB 
for inkscape and then crash. So I split the way up in maximum 1000 nodes and 
memoryuse was no more than 300MB. Seems to be a quite linear relation between 
number of nodes and Inkscape memory usage.

I'm all in favour of trying to dissuade people from creating such long ways. Is 
it also an option to ask the editor developers (Potlatch, JOSM, Merkaartor) to 
invoke a limit?

BTW: this was a border: "Northwest Arctic Borough" from USGS data, so most 
likely an automated import and would not be fixed by my suggestion above.

Maarten