Hi Mike, On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Michael Collinson <m...@ayeltd.biz> wrote: > 1) Reducing latency for general mapping for as many Filipinos as possible. > > It looks as though all Philippine mapper's traffic would get routed through > a network in or around Metro Manila no matter what. Therefore from a > latency point of view alone, and assuming PLDT routing, um, peculiarities, > could be resolved then Manila would be the best place to put a server. A > close second would be Hong Kong ... and might be better as per Eugene's > point.
This reason suggests that latency is a big problem for editors in the Philippines. I daresay that latency is not that big a problem when compared to the broadband average speed of household connections in the country. Most households, when they have broadband connections at all, have an average maximum speed of around 1 Mbps. Actual speeds are much less than that. I did a ping to the OSM server from my home and I get around 400ms in terms of latency. But when you're editing in JOSM and downloading plenty of data, and especially if you also download GPS points too, the download and upload of data takes several seconds. And once the data is downloaded, JOSM will spend some time to parse the OSM XML data and to process it for editing, and this depends on the speed of one's computer. Given that kind of editing situation, latency is a small problem and might not be a best target for improvement. (See Amdahl's Law[1].) On the other hand, setting up a server in HK would also serve many Asian OSM communities like Japan and Indonesia. While this does not specifically target the OSMPH community, and might not foster a technical community, serving the Asian OSM communities might be a better reason for the investment than simply trying to solve network latency problems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law _______________________________________________ talk-ph mailing list talk-ph@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ph
