[OSM-newbies] osmarender vs. mapnik

[Rob Reid]

Harald Kirsch wrote the following on 13/01/2008 23:08:
> >From the wiki I thought the two are just different approaches to
> rendering, but what I see has happened to the area I mapped since Jan.
> 4th, is that mapnik takes care of zoom < 12 were osmarender covers
> zoom>=12. Is this true or is this a coincidence in the area I am working on:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.24&lon=6.857&zoom=11
>
> HaraldK
>   
Both renderers cover all zoom levels.
What you may be noticing is the different time frames that different 
zoom levels are rendered at in the two renderers.

For osmrender zooms >=12, changed tiles are automatically submitted for 
re-rendering every 4 hours. Currently this process only detects changes 
to nodes not ways.
For osmrender zooms <12, the process is currently manual. Even if 
re-renders of z8-z11 are requested via 
http://www.informationfreeway.org/ they are currently not handled 
automatically so will require someone with tiles at home to manually do it. 
I've just kicked of a z8-z11 render now for you for this area.

For mapnik the process is described here : 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Slippy_Map#Mapnik_tile_rendering.
You will sometimes see different zoom levels appearing at different 
times depending when they are marked for re-rendering.
Also I believe from irc logs that the the process to mark tiles dirty 
may have been temporarily disabled a few times in the last week or so to 
reduce load when references/links to OSM on other sites has caused heavy 
traffic.
    
Cheers

rcr