[OSM-dev] How to get offline maps of a large area in reasonable time?

[Ivo Brodien]

Hi,

for a project I need to have a a local tile map server of tiles of (at  
least) Germany for all zoom levels, because I need to have the tiles  
available immediately and reliable. I was thinking of the  
CloudMapMobile tiles because I want to use them on a small screen and  
there they look better.

I know there are the following options:

1) Script to download all the tiles for all the zoom levels

2) use a renderer like Mapnik to render all the tiles.


I started trying  the first options but it is way to slow. Probably  
because some never requested tiles also have to be rendered on the  
server first?
  Well it is not an option because it would take months to download.

So now I am thinking of option 2).  I already have the planet file  
loadet into a PostGIS-DB, so at least, I don't have to care about this  
anymore if I take the Mapnik way.

Does anybody know how many GB the whole world is? Or Germany?

How long would it take to render on a quite powerfull desktop-machine?

Or are there any other ideas on how to get such a big amount of data?


Thanks for any advice.
-Ivo