[OSM-dev] Tirex vs Renderd

[Kai Krueger]

On 04/17/2010 11:29 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Kai,
>
> Kai Krueger wrote:
>> This is less of a question though regarding using renderd vs tirex but
>> more of a question of where the future lies and thus for which to
>> develop new features. It would be a shame and rather inefficient to
>> put in effort to develop features for something that turns out to be a
>> dead end
>
> What particular feature did you want to work on?

It was somewhat intended as a more general question than a specific 
feature, but what sparked the question was the potential need to extend 
the rendering to support a lot of styles (200+) as is currently being 
discussed on the wikimedia maps list. At 
http://cassini.toolserver.org/tile-browse/ there are renderings for all 
the 278 languages wikipedia supports. With renderd each of the rendering 
threads has a copy of all the mapnik styles. As each style takes up 
about 5 - 6 Mb, this results in 278*8*5.5 = 12Gb of ram. Not directly 
desirable. So thoughts exist to implement some form of on demand loading 
and unloading of styles, as it is unlikely that all those styles will be 
needed all the time and/or share memory accross rendering 
threads/processes. So the question somewhat was where to do this 
potential development. But as it is only thoughts at the moment it will 
probably depend on who ever gets to actually implementing this. Hence my 
more general question of which of the two seems more "recomended/future 
proof" for potential developments like that.

Kai

>
> Bye
> Frederik
>