[Tilesathome] Distributed server idea

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:17:33 +0100,
OJW wrote:
> 
> At SotM conference, various people discussed ideas for hosting tiles, much 
> more innovative than the "single combined database/webserver" idea that we 
> use at the moment.  
> 
> For example, most of the computing power we have is held by contributors 
> rather than being in the OSM server rack.  It's not always available, and we 
> don't necessarily trust every machine, and some machines have more facilities 
> than others (disk, bandwidth) but we could design a system that works around 
> those limitations.
> 
> I sketched an idea, and put notes at:
> 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Tiles%40home/Distributed_Server
> 
> 
> No software exists yet of course, but I seem to remember several people 
> interested in server-side coding, maybe they would find a distributed project 
> like this interesting to develop?

I haven't been part of the discussion at SotM, but it looks very good
to me! The only comment I have is about uploading to a tile server by
the client. I think we need to make sure that the tileset is
replicated to at least one other server before the client deletes the
tileset. This to make sure that the tileset doesn't get lost if the
servers goes down before it is able to send the tileset to other
servers. This could either be made possible by the client uploading to
multiple servers or by the client waiting for the server to reply that
it server has distributed the tileset to at least one other server.


Jeroen Dekkers