[Tile-serving] OSM Tile Expiration

[Lynn W. Deffenbaugh (Mr)]

Greetings all,

I saw a reference somewhere that the main OSM tile servers don't use 
osm2pgsql's tile expiration lists, but use something different for (at 
least) relations.  Is this approach documented anywhere?

I've been running a planet-wide tile server for years now and have been 
doing the osm2pgsql/openstreetmap-tiles-update-expire/render_expired 
approach successfully for the most part.  But my updates sometimes fall 
behind and take a long time to get current.  Most of the time is spent 
doing the pending_relations.  As far as I can tell, this is normal.

I realize a different expiration approach won't change the updates, but 
I'm ready to learn if there's a new/better way of maintaining a 
planet-wide tile server.

Lynn (D)

PS.  The munin graphs of my tile server (and IPFS server) are at:

http://ldeffenb.dnsalias.net:14171/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain/index.html

Just ignore the Hot Water Temperature graph at the top!

Oh, and I've been messing with hosting metatiles on IPFS which is why 
the forced renderings are going on.  My tile server doesn't really serve 
out that many tiles!