[OSM-dev] How to earn undying fame

[Tom Hughes]

On 21/06/10 16:00, Nic Roets wrote:

> The result of the uservoice survey[1] is in: The community wants
> routing on our website more than anything else.

Like we didn't know that already.

> And most of the work has already been done. An opensource routing
> engine that can do the job already exists [2]. The routing database
> can be updated weekly. The hardware requirements are quite reasonable
> (64-bit processor with tens of GB of RAM). If a new server is needed,
> I'm sure we'll get the money in fairly quickly.

I'm not sure "tens of Gb of RAM" is that reasonable, though it does 
rather depend how many tens you mean. It's also rather important to know 
how fast that memory requirement is likely to grow.

Equally I would like to have some idea of how many routes/second you 
believe this engine to be capable of on that hardware.

Time to run a weekly update on that hardware is something else we would 
want to know, along with some idea of the likely rate of growth of that 
over time.

Basically we want to scale the hardware so that it not only works now, 
but in a year's time as well. We also want it not to collapse under the 
load when hundreds of people decide to query it simultaneously because 
we've just been on some TV programme.

> All that remains is for someone with a little bit of programming
> experience to volunteer. Make a copy of the osm.org website* and add
> routing buttons. Then write some code that converts the routing engine
> output to a few formats. Open Layers, GPX, human readable text should
> be enough.

No. Whatever solution is adopted should absolutely not involve making a 
copy of the web site. It should be an addon to the web site, not a copy 
of it.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/