[OSM-dev] scaling

Kai Krueger kakrueger at gmail.com
Tue Jan 11 13:28:27 GMT 2011



Serge Wroclawski-2 wrote:
> We're growing exponentially
I am not sure how true this exponential growth is any longer. It certainly
depends on what metric you are looking at.

Probably one of the most telling statistics for the growth of the active OSM
community is the number of editors per month [1]. If you look at that, not
only does it no longer look exponential, growth has more or less stopped
altogether sometime in mid to late 2009 and current levels are back down to
mid 2009 levels, below its peak. So there was no growth in the number of
editors in the last one and a half years. Looking at contributers of GPX, it
looks even worse and we are back at the level of mid 2008.

Other statistics are not so bleak. The number of registered accounts [2]
continues to grow, although eyeballing it, it looks more linear than
exponential in the last year.

In contrast, the size of the dataset [3] continues to grow rapidly, which,
again from eyeballing, continues to look super linear.

This seems to indicate that an active contributor is now adding a lot more
data than they used to. This, although speculatively, hints towards imports
in some form or another or tracing from areal imagery is possibly becoming
ever more important in terms of data volume.

What this shift of pattern means for scaling is imho not entirely clear. On
the one hand more and large imports would likely put more burden on the
write paths of the API, as imports don't need to download data first to edit
it. On the other hand with the growing density of map data, each map call is
likely becoming much more complex than it used to be, shifting the burden
back towards read loads.

Kai

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Osmdbstats4A.png
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Osmdbstats1.png
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Osmdbstats2.png

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