[Tilesathome] lowzoom rendering takes forever?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 02:04:37PM +0100, Hakan Tandogan wrote:
> spaetz wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 12:18:57PM +1100, Brent Easton wrote:
> > 
> >> I believe there is nothing wrong, that's just the way the new lowzoom works. 
> >> The amount of data downloaded in a z8 tile can be huge for areas around well mapped cities. 
> > 
> > As the guy who initially did the "new lowzoom" I would like to comment on the situation. It was an experiment as I was annoyed by unreadable text at low zoom levels and want to play with Etienne's osmxapi. However given the scaling problems we see, I am convinced that this is the wrong approach and should be turned off until we have something feasable.
> 
> No, please don't turn off the lowzoom rendering. The readable place 
> names on lower zoom levels (say, z8 or so) are simply too useful, 
> especially for larger countries which consist of multiple z8 tiles.
> 
> People can already tell the server that their machines are not capable 
> of rendering lowzoom tiles. Perhaps we could even use the server 
> feedback to automatically determine people who can render lowzooms.

*No* Machine that I'vve ever found is capable of rendering all lowzoom
tiles: these things take 16GB+ of RAM! There's simply no way that the
current stylesheets create a solution which works. Until that works, the
server isn't giving out lowzoom tiles. Some other solution needs to
exist first.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta