[Tile-serving] Tile Server Hardware Recommendations

[James Parker Badger]

Hello!

I am working with a project at the University of Calgary, Canada and we would like to build our own database and tile server. We are building an Arctic-focused mapping platform called Arctic Connect, and one of the components is offering map tiles in more Arctic-friendly map projections.

I set up an older server in our research lab with the Switch2OSM guide, and it is working but we are starting to hit I/O bottlenecks when doing database reads for renderd. Our current server:

Intel Server Board S5520SCR
Intel Server Chassis SC5600BRP
Intel Xeon E5530 2.4GHz
6x 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM
2x GBE
4x GBE on expansion card
Intel RAID Controller RS2PI008
Intel RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I

2x 300 GB 15kRPM drives in Hardware RAID 1 for the system
4x 2 TB WD Red drives in ZFS RAID 10 for the tiles
2x 512 GB Samsung 840 EVO drives in ZFS RAID 1 for the PostgreSQL database

While pre-rendering tiles the server does not seem to finish zoom level 8 after a few days. iostat is reporting near 100% disk utilization for the SSDs, with read await spiking to the 100-200 ms range.

I was asked to investigate what options we have for upgrading or buying a new server. I have found the server options available on the net overwhelming to review and I was hoping someone on the list would be able to give me some pointers on what kind of things I should be looking for in new hardware. We also do not want to have to buy new hardware in a year or two, so our purchase should be able to last a few years.

We are looking to open our tile server to public use and partner with some Arctic data platforms, so I expect there to be lighter usage than OSM's servers. But having tiles that are up-to-date and rendered quickly is a priority.

Sincerely,

James Badger
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