[OSM-talk] Slippy Map update

[SteveC]

* @ 22/11/06 06:51:50 PM david at frankieandshadow.com wrote:
> Can I suggest again that this would be a great distributed application. I'm

Yes and no.

It's not actually that slow to render maps. The reason it's taken a
couple of weeks is because only artem really knew how to run mapnik and
get planet in a db and all the other bits to make it fly. This is now
documented and several of us know how to do it. So, today it's rendering
Germany. Tomorrow we can have three machines doing three countries. The
time to render the planet might be a week or two if someone was
dedicated to it.

Keeping the data current will require far, far less effort as you're only
going to be rendering some small percentage per day.

People helping with the initial set of tiles is very useful, but it's
already getting fragmented with two sets of bits of Germany and so on.
Integrating these isn't actually that simple if you have a rendering in
progress and people (already) rendering different datasets which
overlap. Could I ask for a little restraint as I can see managing
peoples contributed tiles is going to be a pain in itself?

Mapnik needs some work to minimise the amount of data it spits out.
There are a lot of blank land/sea tiles that should be symlinks to just
one. Odds and ends like that.

Coming back to the distributed rendering, this ad-hoc people-heavy route
will do initially I think. I'm unconvinced on shipping entire planets
and disk images around is going to be worthwhile once the tiles are
being rendered daily on just the things that have changed.


To organise things (unless you don't want your tiles on the main site),
if you're rendering tiles can you state what areas you're doing on this
wiki page

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Render_me

(apologies if this has already been pointed to)

and also provide a link to a tarball of your tiles so that they can be
integrated?

have fun,

SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/