[Tilesathome] Render Queue getting bigger

[Dermot McNally]

Folks,

I'm a Tiles at home novice, so be kind - I didn't see any thread
obviously covering this in the archives. In the past, I made a
half-hearted effort to get a running instance, but didn't persevere,
and re-rendering seemed to work OK without me.

Given the serious backlog of tiles in the queue (and the fact that I
haven't seen any of my own re-render requests coming back for about a
week), I decided to investigate and see if I could do anything to help
- specifically, to build a running instance of tiles at home on my Mac
Pro. This I did, and requested a login as detailed on the Wiki. I
didn't receive one yet, but I did notice the note that indicates that
there are more than enough nodes out there rendering. Fair enough, but
now what?

First my observations as a t at h newbie:

* As per http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~ojw/Log/Requests/, progress on
re-rendering went from good to nearly nothing about a week ago (in
fact, the earlier period has just vanished off the graph).

* This suggested (to me) either too few rendering nodes, misbehaviour
of those nodes (old and blocked t at h versions, maybe the osmarender
quirks that seem to have arisen for some people, whatever?) or maybe
the general API slowdown.

* However, my own locally run render requests do run OK (if sometimes
after a very long wait for the data to download, but that seems to be
getting better now).

So on the one hand, there are supposed to be plenty of folk rendering
out there. On the other hand, only a trickle of stuff is actually
getting rendered and the queue is growing by about 1,000 tiles a day.

Can somebody who knows more outline what the true obstacle is here,
and whether I or anybody else can help?

Dermot