[Talk-us] US-based Server

Val Kartchner val42k at gmail.com
Thu Oct 29 04:35:22 GMT 2009


On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 01:55 +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Adam,
> 
> Adam Schreiber wrote:
> > I'm sorry that I'm not a database engineer.  I would think that some
> > kind of block or re-direct could be made to the server responsible for
> > the segment of the planet allotted to it.
> 
> That would be the "segmentation" route. Certainly possible (having many 
> regions in the world where each is the master of its own data), however 
> it would make certain operations more difficult ("give me the capital 
> cities world wide" would be a query that would have to access servers on 
> several continents). Also, when merging data from multiple segments, 
> some kind of namespace would have to be introduced (so that node #1234 
> from the Americas server is not confused with node #1234 from the Asia 
> server etc.) - Edits spanning multiple segments would be near impossible 
> (or, more positively perhaps, a big challenge).

I have a suggestion that should solve this problem.  Others have touched
on this solution but haven't quite stated it this way.

Each domain answers its own DNS queries.  The tiles could be read from
tiles.openstreetmap.org.  The IP address of this would be answered
depending on the location of the domain requesting the IP address.  DNS
queries in North America could be directed to a machine in the USA while
those in Europe would be directed to the one in the UK.  Other regions
would be directed as they gain proxies.  The tiles would then be caches
relatively local, since the tiles are the most-requested data.  The
open-source Squid proxy server could be used.

This way you don't have to worry about namespaces or merging tiles from
different regions.  Every tile has its current, unique identifier.

Any database operations and map updates would go directly to the
database in the UK.  This would avoid any problems with distributed
databases.  Once this semi-distributed model has been set up, more could
be done to split the load.

Just a suggestion that could be useful.

- Val -





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