[Tilesathome] New hardware available to serve the project somehow

[Andres Kaaber]

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 01:50:54 Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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

Yes, I completely agree with you :) I just wanted to inform that If this kind 
of HW is needed then it is available, just ask and I'm more then happy to 
help out :)

-- 
Andres Kaaber
IT ja sidebüroo juhataja
Ida-Eesti päästekeskus
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