[Tilesathome] Server resources available

[Maarten Deen]

Roel Baardman wrote:

> I am a student at the University of Twente, The Netherlands.
> Being a member of Studenten Net Twente, I operate some mirrors for open
> source software (we have nl.debian.org and I do gentoo among others).
> Currently I am only a mirror for the OSM world file, but I would like to
> see how I can help OSM with the resources available to me.
>
> I am wondering how "heavy" serving tiles is. Is it just a cache of
> pre-calculated tiles, or does it involve a lot of computation for the
> server in question? The server I have available at the moment is highly
> optimized for pushing as much data out as possible (it peaks at 1.5
> GBit, with the PCI bus being the bottle-neck), so computation might be a
> problem. Static content would be great however.

Serving tiles does not need computation. The computation (generation of tiles)
for the osmarender layer is done via clients and the tiles are stored on disk.
The Mapnik layer usually is rendered on the client.

> The Wiki doesn't state much about tile serving other than "we need help" :)

Personally I would welcome another XAPI server more than another tile server.
There are three XAPI servers now, and all three are down.

Regards,
Maarten