OSM's future. Was: Re: [Openstreetmap] OSM Performance is terrible

[Preben Mikael Bohn]

> what Do you think of a distributed architecture for OSM. Let anyone who
> is willing to support OSM run a bittorrent-style server for OSM.
> Servers are syncing p2p and anyone who accesses OSM gets redirected to a
> server around the world, i.e. randomly or in a more dedicated way.
>
> If only 5% of the users would be willing to do so server load would be
> reduced to a value that can be handled by any hardware and bandwidth. And
> OSM power/bandwidth would grow with it's users.

Personnally I think this is a great idea. I don't know if bittorent is to
complex (I think it should stay as simple as possible) so another approach
is to delegate different geographical regions to different servers (which
could also be placed physically close to the region it serves in order to
minimise network latency). This has the advantage that the space
requirement is also minimised (although there should be a central backup
somewhere).

However if a bittorent solution is easy to maintain/install/etc, then this
would probably be easier to administer on a high level (delegation of
processing/space/etc)...

I would be happy to host the danish region. :-)

Best regards Preben