[Tilesathome] Purpose of Tiles at home

[Sebastian Spaeth]

Hans F. Nordhaug wrote:
> Me: I have just installed the Tiles at home client on my server - nice to be
> able to contribute some CPU cycles to the OpenStreetMap project.
> 
> Shaun McDonald: um do you know that one machine can deal with the
> rendering of the whole world wilst T at H needs lots of machines and
> bandwidth?

Well, that is their view and they are certainly entitled to it. Others
see it differently. tiles.openstreetmap.org will cut your IP if you suck
too many tiles and there was some discussion in the past as to enforce
stricter limits. That is no criticizm of the foundation, they probably
have to do that in order to keep their bandwidth under control and of
course there is also a commercial startup that would like to sell these
services. tiles at home on the other hand has so far never ever cut of a
single IP for downloading too many tiles.

Also see Freeriks response: tiles at home has provided close-to-realtime
map updates since hwow many years? At least March 2007. It's only a
rather short time ago that mapnik started showing hourly (and minutely
now?) updates.

The "wasteful" way to t at h has also spawned quite some infrastructure
development around the main API. There would have been no Read-only
mirrors of the OSM data without t at h.

There are also some differences in style creation. Mapnik is centrally
driven, while t at h is much more open to community "enhancements"
(sometimes an advantage and sometimes not).

So, given the historical reason, I wouldn't say that it's a worthless
piece. Yes, it is more effort than a single mapnik instance, but it
runs, it is independent from the foundation and any commercial interests
and the styles are very much user-driven.

Will it hurt if we turn off t at h at some time in the future? Probably not
that much, but it already has had its benefits.

spaetz

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