[OSM-talk] Static osmarender tile generation

[David Earl]

This looks like it has great promise.

If (say) these tiles are 500m across, at 12Kb each (and this is a dense
area), then that's 50Kb/km^2. There are 1600 km squares on an OS landranger
map, = about 80Mb per such map, and the British Isles is covered by about
200 of these, so that's 16 Gb. While that's a lot if you're renting space on
a shared web server, it's almost trivial if you have a server with a
complete disk to yourself. A 300Gb disk is well under 100 pounds. I think
this demonstrates that a pre-rendering is entirely feasible, and would be
very responsive.

Of course, it would be rather large if the whole world were attempted,
without some investment. Alternatively if each country or a group of
countries could supply their own server space, then a worldwide cache starts
to look feasible. Divide and conquer. Obviously, there would need to be some
central redirection going on in such a scenario.

Maybe a BitTorrent like approach might work, with micro servers (as part of
an established site for example) offering a small number of tiles at almost
no cost to the provider. Similarly the SETI like approach of utilising large
numbers of idle computers to spread the regeneration might be interesting.

The other thing this shows is the awful way the text overlaps making the map
almost unreadable. Some of the text is obviously too big, but even so it is
going to need some careful tuning of where to put some of the points, and
more intelligent rendering before a map is in a widely usable form.

David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
> [mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org]On Behalf Of Nick Burch
> Sent: 15 October 2006 12:55
> To: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [OSM-talk] Static osmarender tile generation
>
>
> Hi All
>
> I've written a basic script to pass a .osm file through osmarender at a
> number of scales, output these svgs at increasing dpis, and then
> split the
> resultant pngs up into handy tiles. Oh, and there's also a simple html
> page to let you zoom in, pan around etc.
[snip]