[OSM-dev] Set up your "personal tile server" for experiments - what machine / installation suitable?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ulf Lamping wrote:
> For the rendering and as a first step it would be enough to do this 
> "europe wide" (and e.g. use the geofabrik excerpts), but maybe it's even 
> easier in the long run to use (and especially update) the planet once 
> it's imported into the DB?!?

If you do not need diff updates *and* have enough RAM then it makes 
sense to do full imports without --slim. That gives you a significant 
speedup on import, and the database will use less disk space (but only a 
few GB if we're talking a small extract).

Also, since you say you want to play with rendering, it is not unlikely 
that you will modify your osm2pgsql style file (which determines the 
tags that are imported), and even if you run in "update mode" with 
--slim you will have to rebuild your database every time you do that.

> If it's obvious, that this machine can't deal with the task, what's the 
> weak spot? Will it be a good idea to add some more RAM, or is the CPU 
> too slow ...

CPU is not the problem. If you go without --slim then RAM will be a 
problem; even for a Germany import you'll probably need 2 or 4 GB. If 
you use --slim then it will basically work with 1 GB, however imports 
and updates will be slow. A second hard disk and RAID-0 setup would 
probably halp to speed up things.

Bye
Frederik