[OSM-dev] OWL + OSM Activity Server

[Paweł Paprota]

On 10/19/2012 03:06 PM, Roland Olbricht wrote:
>
> If you are C++ averse, the good news is that you may resolve the real
> bottleneck independent of the programming language.

I'm OK with C++ when it is justified. I personally am more productive in 
Java/Ruby/Python than C++.

> I've written down
> some notes about the Overpass API implementation with similar
> scalability problems:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Technical_details
>

Thanks, this is great stuff, I would definitely be interested in 
learning from people more experienced in processing OSM data.

I just simply don't have server resources to work with anything larger 
than a Europe dump which already is crawling on the hardware I've got 
available.

> However, XML parsing (and gzip compression) are heavily CPU
> intensive. Thus, it might be a good idea to retain these in C++ or
> getting done in carefully chosen external libraries.
>

It would be interesting to see what is the overhead of Ruby when parsing 
with libxml-ruby (or Nokogiri which is another thin layer on top of 
libxml) compared to C/C++.

Maybe another way to go would be to use PBF which is supposed to be much 
faster for machine reading.

Paweł