[Tilesathome] local slippymap (was: Tiles at home unavailable all Monday)

[Frederik Ramm]

Lars,

> Well, that's the end of my patience with OJW.  I
> started to use t at h because Mapnik tiles were updating too slowly,
> I came to depend on t at h, and that turned out to be a big mistake.

Since you mainly use t at h while doing coastline work, may I suggest  
the following:

Set "LocalSlippymap=true" in your t at h config, and provide a suitable  
"WorkingDirectory" (e.g. /var/www/webspace/tiles). This will create a  
subdir for each layer (named after the layer name in layers.conf),  
and inside that, the same structure that is also on the t at h server.  
Tiles will not be uploaded any more, but stored there.

You can then simply grab the OpenLayers installation - I just did a  
wget -r on informationfreeway.org -, install it locally, change the  
tile URL in the JavaScript file, and then you have the perfect local  
slippy map. You can also greatly speed up rendering by setting the  
maximum zoom level in your layers.conf to 12 or 13 instead of 17,  
assuming that level 12 is sufficient for your coastline work.

As regards t at h on dev, I have not uploaded anything in the last weeks  
(except that huge upload job where I had to save Europe from global  
warming with 250k empty tiles). I used to automatically create lists  
of outdated tiles by comparing the tile stats with the planet file,  
put them in the queue and/or run my own server farm on the list, but  
that is a luxury that we cannot currently afford (we are busy enough  
updating those tiles that people explicitly request to be updated, no  
need to flood the queues with thousands of tiles just because we know  
they have changed).

Neither will I process requests from the queue - what good are a few  
extra renderers when the existing ones can't even get their tiles  
uploaded? In my view, running a render farm currently hurts the  
server more than it helps. I'll be back online when the system is  
stable again.

Bye
Frederik

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