[osmosis-dev] Osmosis use case

[Walschlager, Gerard]

Hi Frederik and Peter,

The bottom line for my investigation of mapping tools is that I need to have a local database of the world to perform lookups and rendering of maps on a "standard" Windows based desktop computer in a reasonably quick fashion (i.e. pan/zoom operations complete in 1 to 5 seconds).

Performance wise, for my scenario, I'm not sure which would be better: rendering as tiled images or rendering as SVG.  

My application will be using WPF which can render XAML based graphic paths, which can be derived from SVG.  There is a utility called Osmarender that I've heard of and I understand it can render to SVG.  I also heard that Mapnik can do the same?  Maybe that would be better than tiles for performance reasons as well as opening up the possibility of saving user defined annotations if that's something needed in the future (saved as a new SVG file locally).  I think Osmarender would work with a MySQL database.  Would you guess if rendering as SVG and then converting to XAML be faster than working with images rendered on-the-fly?

If I go with rendering as tiled images, then I have to consider rendering on-the-fly or pre-rendering in advance.  If I pre-rendered in advance, then I suppose I would run Mapnik over the entire osm2pgsql generated database and that would in turn generate yet another database of tiled images?  Any thoughts on size of a database of 256x256 PNG images for entire "planet.osm" contents?  Or, is rendering on-the-fly going to allow me to perform my rendering of user requests in a few seconds?

So, it seems that there are a few options, but I need to sort out which would be best for my needs on a desktop Windows application.  Any thoughts about advantages/disadvantages of using Osmarender vs. Mapnik for my situation?  Any further input greatly appreciated!

Thanks again both of you for your gracious help,
Gerard 


-----Original Message-----
From: Frederik Ramm [mailto:frederik at remote.org] 
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2010 6:33 AM
To: Walschlager, Gerard
Cc: osmosis-dev at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [osmosis-dev] Osmosis use case

Hi,

Walschlager, Gerard wrote:
> You mentioned that osm2pgsql needs more RAM (16GB+ during
> import).  Do you know how much RAM would be required for normal
> lookup and rendering usage with either slim or non-slim usage?

For normal lookup it doesn't make a difference. It should run on a 4 GB 
machine without problems.

> Also, I think a schema that didn't have history would be better for
> my purposes (less data) as I only need lookup and rendering
> capabilities (i.e. read-only).

I think then osm2pgsql is going to be your friend.

Bye
Frederik