Hi!

I just finished my slides for the Tirex lightning talk that I hope to give at
SOTM. Not everybody is coming to SOTM, so I thought I might highlight some
things here:

Tirex is a tile rendering system. So its sits behind a web server and makes
sure map tiles are rendered when they are needed. It is a much more flexible
replacement for renderd. It uses the same metatile file format and filesystem
layout as renderd so its easy to switch.

Tirex is very configurable. You can have as many different map styles as you
want and different backends to render these maps. The most often used backend
is, of course, Mapnik, but there is also a "test" backend provided (helps
to verify that your installation works without having to install all the
Mapnik stuff). There is also a new WMS backend that will leave the rendering
to a WMS server. With this you can use Tirex as an alternative to TileCache.
You can configure how many rendering processes of the different kinds you
want and how they should be used for higher priority "live" requests and
lower priority "background" requests. This allows you to keep your machine
working on re-rendering old tiles while not blocking live requests.

Tirex comes with some nifty tools such as the tirex-status program which allows
you to see what Tirex is currently doing, how large the queues are etc. There
is a batch rendering tool that you can use to (re-)render tiles for some map,
zoom range, and bbox with a specified priority. You can tell it to only render
non-existing tiles, or only tiles older than a certain age etc. There are
several scripts to create statistics from log files and the tile directory and
even a script to create nice maps showing your where you have tiles or how old
they are. There are plugins for Munin and Nagios.

Tirex has been used for a while now on the tile.openstreetmap.de tile server
and some others and I consider it quite stable. The biggest missing point is
the link between the web server and Tirex. Currently the mod_tile module
developed for use with renderd is also used for Tirex. Tirex has some special
"backwards compatibility code" for that. But we are already working on a
"mod_tirex" that will make this part more flexible, too.

There is extensive documentation at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tirex
and there are man pages for all the commands. Of course all of this is Open
Source, you can find the source in the OSM subversion repository.

If you are running your own tile server or plan to do it, I encourage you to
give it a try. Questions, bug reports and patches are welcome, be it on this
list or at SOTM.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  joc...@remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298


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