[OSM-talk] rendering with mapnik, what do I need?

[Chris Jones]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Jo wrote:

> Say I would like to set up a server myself. I want to:
>
> * show highways more with the colours used on Michelin maps
> * show a bicycle map as three overlays (transparent, with a possibility
> to switch them on and off)
> * show bus routes for each bus separately as overlays (transparent layers)
>
> 1. Is this possible?

Yes

> 2. What do I need? PostgreSQL? Python? What else?

See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Mapnik

> 3. What kind of server would be good for this? Would an AMD64 with one
> core be able to do this? Do I need more cores? Does 64 bit processing
> help? Or would I be just as well off with a Core2Duo or even a Pentium 4?

Any recent processor is fine, obviously the faster the core(s) the more 
tiles you can render in a given time.

> 4. For the disks I was considering to set up a RAID1 mirror with 2 disks
> of 750 GB. I guess that would be sufficient?

How much storage you need depends on how much of the world you would like 
to render and to what zoom level.

I render the whole UK to level 5 and just Wales to zoom 16, this uses a 
mere 450MB

In my experience each zoom level is roughly 2.5x bigger (in terms of disk 
space) than the previous.

Unless your planning to serve the whole world, to hundreds of clients at 
a time (which your connection info below suggests your not) RAID1 is 
massive overkill! The regularly requested tiles will get cached in memory 
anyway further reducing the disk speed requirements.

I serve (pre-rendered) tiles from a NSLU2* running Debian with a USB stick 
for storage. This setup quite happily serves ~150 tiles per second.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

> I would like to do this from 'home' with a connection that has a fixed
> IP address and 1 or 2 Mbps upload. I'll probably be shaping the traffic
> to limit it and make my own internet connection still usable.

With a 2 Mbps upload you should be able to serve about 40 tiles per second

--
Chris Jones, SUCS Admin
http://sucs.org