[OSM-talk] Server slowness

[Mikel Maron]

I haven't seen anyone emphasize that OSM is at this very moment using PostGIS.

The rendering engine, Mapnik, is backed by PostGIS. Artem wrote a preprocessor,
which loads planet.osm into PostGIS, in a schema optimized for rendering.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Slippy_Map#PostGreSQL

When Mapnik rendering was demonstrated, it was clear that this setup offered
huge efficiency boosts (and aside, looked awesome) over rendering directly from 
the OSM editing db.

So OSM is entirely open to any platform that demonstratively improves OSM.

-Mikel