[OSM-talk] Downloading lots of tiles from tile.openstreetmap.org

[Jon Burgess]

We don't have any specific terms of service for downloading tiles from
tile.openstreetmap.org and people often download thousands of tiles with
scripts. Quite often people often submit requests for completely invalid
tile co-ordinates. A couple of examples from this evening:-


[09/Nov/2007:20:15:35 +0000] "GET /mapnik//12529/11592.png HTTP/1.1" 

* The zoom level is missing from this request.


[09/Nov/2007:22:40:08 +0000] "GET /20/528358/383233.png HTTP/1.1"

* This client is trying to fetch zoom=20 tiles which have never existed.
The highest zoom for the Mapnik layer is 18


The examples have been repeated 100,000+ times from 2 IP addresses
today. I don't want to restrict people from downloading lots of tiles
but if people keep submitting bad requests then it is a complete waste
of bandwidth and server resources.

If you write tools to grab lots of tiles please at least try to ensure
you are fetching valid tiles URLs!

	Jon