[Tilesathome] New hardware available to serve the project somehow

[Frederik Ramm]

Andres, Jose -

    thank you for your generous offers. tiles at home could really benefit 
from its own server(s). I had started a thread on the dev list (that was 
before we had a t at h list) in May about this:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2007-May/004958.html

I am really in favour of moving tiles at home completely away from dev, and 
since the tiles at home server does not access the OSM database, there's 
absolutely no need for it to sit where the other servers are.

If you look at the numbers and the Munin graphs, you'll see that the 
tiles at home server has to handle a lot of disk and network I/O. I am not 
really a hardware expert so I cannot judge if the servers that you are 
talking about can handle that, and if the network pipe is big enough.

In a multi-server setup, it would be possible to have one server run the 
Mysql database with the tile meta data and process uploads, while a 
second server (accessing the tile repository in read-only mode) would 
serve tile download requests. That could provide some breathing space 
for the components involved, but on the other hand there's still one 
place where tiles are stored so if the bottleneck turns out to be 
writing to and reading from the tile repository then it might not be 
such a good idea to have separate servers.

You are of course free to just get the current PHP source (it is in SVN 
under sites/other/tilesAtHome or so), install it and play around with 
it. Modifying the t at h client to upload to your server(s) should be 
simple. Some guidance by OJW will perhaps be required as regards pieces 
of the puzzle that aren't in SVN (like apache config, cron jobs, MySQL 
structure).

The final decision on whether and where tiles at home is moved lies with 
the people running "render farms" - you can provide the best server, but 
if they don't follow, then your server will run empty. And while the 
people running "render farms" are free to decide how they participate, 
they will most likely do what OJW  (Oliver White, creator of tiles at home 
and current maintainer of the tiles at home server on dev) says. If he says 
  he's closing down t at h on dev and re-opening it on one of your servers, 
then everyone is likely to follow. (Some URLs need to be fixed in the 
slippy maps out there afterwards but that's the smallest problem.)

So my advice would be: Analyse the requirements (starting from my 
posting above, and looking at the munin graphs etc.), find out whether 
your servers are likely to outperform the dev server (to a degree that 
makes a move worthwile), then install the t at h server components for 
testing, and if it all looks good, then talk to OJW about making the 
move. (It would be wise to solicit some opinion from him beforehand. 
He's sometimes hard to reach, try IRC.)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'