[Osmf-talk] Tiles

[Peter Gervai]

On Fri, 2 Jun 2023 16:48:00 -0600
m at rtijn.org wrote:

> I agree with Steve; OSMF should not be in the business of serving
> tiles (raster or vector, that's immaterial) except to support the
> volunteer mapping community as needed.

Apart from philosophical considerations I think it is important to look
at the technical/resource side: what does it mean for the OSMF to
- provide tiles for "editors" (it is not clear how this could be done,
  restricting it to editors, but let's suppose it is doable),
- provide tiles for small time users, webpages
- provide tiles for "everyone" including large traffic personal and
  business websites.

I noticed in this thread that some people are lack the actual data
required for this decision: some thought the said traffic is a real
burden on the foundation servers while others say that it is almost
negligible. 

Question is whether there is a difference between serving raster tiles
for editors and small time users and doing the same with vector tiles.
I do not think there is a philosophical difference, and the technical
considerations are almost the same.

Another important point may be to know the difference of the resource
usage of vector tile generation; while I serve vector tiles for a while
to a closed group I confess I haven't analysed the traffic. What I have
observed though that generation requires less resources than raster
tiles, serving it seems to be similar, my guess is that the amount of
traffic is lower and the rendering is definitely faster and more
versatile; based on my guesstimates providing vector tiles are cheaper
than raster counterparts. 

I can still agree that OSMF shall let people to provide vector tiles, I
just wanted to chime in with the technical side, since I prefer
decisions based on data instead of emotions.

Peter

ps: at the moment I only serve Hungary since the generator runs on a
simple low resource container, but I plan to make europe and world
tests. I also promised people to share the how-to on the wiki, I need
to work on that. It would make easy for anyone to pull up a vector
server.