[Tilesathome] Experimental Batik Support

[Jason Reid]

Brent Easton wrote:
> After successful testing using Batik as a replacement for Inkscape, I have added Batik as an option for rendering in tiles at home.
>
> This is still somewhat experimental as I only have a 1GB windows machine. I need assistance to push it a bit further. I am especially interested in people trying with 2GB or more of RAM installed and on linux. Please just run tiles manually and check the results.
>
> The default behaviour of t at h is unchanged, it will continue to use Inkscape as before. To play with Batik you need to do the following:
>
> 1. Download the latest version of Batik and install it somewhere. I have been testing with the 1.7beta1 version. Batik just consists of a bunch of Java libaries (.jar files), just copy them into a convenient directory. Make sure you also have the batik-rasterizer.jar file.
>
> 2. Add some parameters to your tilesathome.conf file:
>
>   a) Turn Batik rendering on:
>
> Batik=1   
>
>   b) Set the maximum size of the JVM to be allocated. You want to set this as large as possible to cope with complex tiles. On windows XP the maximum you can set is 1300M. If you set it too high, java will not start up. (Try java -Xmx1400M to test).
>
> BatikJVMSize=1300M
>
>   c) Point to the location of Batik
>
> BatikPath=c:\tilesAtHome\batik\batik-rasterizer.jar
>
> 3. Make sure you have the latest Osmarender.xsl installed.
>
> That's it.
>
> This just uses the standard rasterizer program which does have one major disadvantage - If there is an error in the generated SVG, it just throws and exception and fails. However, batik-rasterizer is open source and we can modify this if testing is successful. There may also be scope to tweak the behaviour to match OSM processing and gain some performance improvements. The current procedure is to load up the same SVG multiple times to render each strip, we may be able to to load the SVG only once and render all of the required strips in one go.
>
> Looking forward to hearing results,
>
> Thanks,
> Brent.
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> Brent Easton                       
> Analyst/Programmer                               
> University of Western Sydney                                   
> Email: b.easton at uws.edu.au
>
>   
So far so good. Rendered off a number of tiles now, no issues popped up 
at all. CPU usage looks to be the heaviest factor, watching in top as it 
ran there were points that it was showing 225% usage with only a single 
instance running. I've had 2 instances running now side by side for a 
half dozen plus tiles and they seem to be cooperating as well, so its 
looking good for people who have the capacity to run multiple clients.

I've got it running on the following hardware:

2x Quad core Xeon
4GB RAM
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (x64_86)

Batik 1.7beta1, and the Java version is 1.6.0_02. I have it running with 
BatikJVMSize=1300M, memory usage on the largest tile I tried didn't go 
over about 700mb.


-Jason Reid