[OSM-dev] ANNOUNCEMENT: T at H server will go away end of February

[Dirk-Lüder Kreie]

Am 06.02.2012 09:54, schrieb Sven Geggus:
> To be serious, I consider distributed rendering "broken by design".

I agree.

> Here is why: 
> 
> Distributed computing is usually a good idea when computing takes more time
> than data transmission. Otherwise it just does not make sense to transmit
> the data rather then just computing it right at the place where it is
> needed.

Additionally to that you cannot render on request, and have to prerender
the entire world, which is wasteful in any respect, (Rendering time,
transmission volume and disk space)

TilesAtHome was successful because of three main factors: The styles
were easily modifiable, The Client was relatively easy to set up and
when it started it was the only method to get reasonably up-to date Maps.

The rendering ruleset became ever more complicated over time, and Mapnik
developers added the support for almost instantaneous updates, so only
the "easy to install" part of the client remained, but with that came
specialisation on the sole purpose of providing tiles for The
TilesAtHome server, and less an easy rendering tool for a Mapper at home.

So one possible future of the software would be to transform it into a
quick Tiles prerenderer for home use, where a power user could
distribute the work on their machines, for their area only, so the
server simply goes away.

However due to the ever more dense maps this is not something that
easily runs on a home pc anymore, because the process of OSM-XML to SVG
to PNG tiles is very very inefficient.

All in all it was worthwile to let the project run "on its own" until
something broke, but in my opinion it is not really worth to resurrect
full scale after the Server goes away.

-- 

Dirk-Lüder "Deelkar" Kreie
Bremen - 53.0901°N 8.7868°E

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