[Tile-serving] New option for tile server: Nginx+Tirex

[Kai Krueger]

On 05/23/2013 07:48 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hiroshi,
>
>> Thanks for powerful features of Nginx and its 3rd party modules,
>> we developed a tile server front-end on Nginx that work with
>> Tirex and PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
>
> Thank you, this is very interesting. I have long wanted to write a 
> proper Apache module that would talk to Tirex directly rather than use 
> Tirex' mod-tile socket emulation, but I'm not religious about web 
> servers so if Nginx does the job, why not use that.
What's the advantage of talking to tirex directly, compared to using the 
mod-tile socket emulation? What should mod_tile be able to do, that it 
currently can't with the emulation layer?

I have been thinking about extending the mod_tile / renderd protocol to 
better support multi-lingual maps by adding a "parameter" variable to 
the protocol. I.e. one could for example then specify the base map-style 
and pass in a parameter in which language to render the text. I also 
planned to add a mime type, so that one can for example support both png 
and jpeg.

If there are other additions that one needs in the protocol between tile 
server and rendering daemon, then that could probably be roled into that 
change as well. It would be good to not change the protocol too often 
though, to ensure backwards and forwards compatibility, so that one can 
mix and match tile servers and rendering daemons as one can now with 
tirex and renderd.

If the tirex protocol already provides those features, then it likely 
wouldn't be difficult to extend mod_tile to support that as well (you 
don't need to write a whole new module to add a feature... ;-)) Mod_tile 
already supports using either unix domain sockets or TCP/IP sockets to 
connect to the rendering backend.
>
> It will be interesting to see whether the lua code can match the 
> C-based mod_tile in terms of throughput on a high-traffic system.
My guess would be that unless you are google or perhaps mapbox or 
mapquest, the speed of the tile server code doesn't matter too much. The 
limiting factor is likely the disk system of retrieving the tiles 
anyway, not the code.

Kai
>
> Good job!
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>