[OSM-dev] GSoC Project Update (Fast Track Deployment of Customised OSM Tile Server)

[Igor Podolskiy]

Hello Parveen, hello Stephan, hello @dev,

> On 26.05.2011 05:03, Parveen Arora wrote:
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Fast_Track_Deployment_of_Customised_OSM_Tile_Server
>>
>> Give your suggestions, comments and feedback or anything that you want
>> to add or delete from it or anything that you want to suggest from
>> your side will be welcomed.
>
> You could consider including a way to just run the server on an extract
> not only on a full planet.
>
> Your site names a few potential "users" of your project. I have the
> feeling that for most of them the hardware requirements would be too high.
absolutely. I have successfully run tile servers (in fact, complete OSM 
clones with rails port and all) on what is listed there as "bare 
minimum". Of course, that was for a small region, and with heavily 
filtered data (only boundaries, major roads, and some custom data). That 
way, I was able to rerender all tiles every 10 minutes.

Parveen, I have a feeling that the main use case you are considering is 
to serve a Slippy Map-like website for the whole world as an audience. 
There is nothing wrong with that, of course. On the other hand, the 
application also targets "Companies". I work at a "Company" - we set up 
our own tile servers with a custom style for a small region from time to 
time, but they are for our internal use only, because we need them for 
one of our projects (we are public transportation consultants). I 
suspect this is a much more common use case - albeit much less visible, 
obviously - than providing a slippy map for a broad audience.

What counts here is to be able to set up the server (1) fast and (2) on 
cheap hardware or VMs, and (3) and to be able to more or less quickly 
cut out what you need based on the region and the tags. Tag-based 
filtering may be out of scope of your project, but region extraction 
should be there.

Also, your requirements don't list processor requirements. In my 
experience, many tasks involved in rendering and filtering are 
CPU-bound, so number of cores/processor class is a thing to consider for 
me, too.

Greetings from Stuttgart,
Igor