Matthias Julius wrote: >> Also see Freeriks response: ti...@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. > And here the question arises whether this has made t...@h obsolete.
I agree that the fact that t...@h used to be more current (but is not anymore) is no valid reason to keep it running. But it was just giving the development of events justifying the existence of t...@h during that time. >> There are also some differences in style creation. Mapnik is centrally >> driven, while t...@h is much more open to community "enhancements" >> (sometimes an advantage and sometimes not). > One could follow the same approach when maintaining mapnik styles. Sure, but it seems no one is donating a potent mapnik server (with the corresponding bandwidth) and allowing the community to experiment with .styles. t...@h distributes the load and while the server uses loads of bandwidth, it's pretty easy on the CPU and RAM requirements. > > I don't think it is justified to keep t...@h running just for hysterical > raisins. If mapnik is so much more efficient one could replace the > t...@h render infrastructure with a mapnik server using the same styles. > Users of the map probably won't see the difference. True, you could simply replace the server with a mapnik instance, but see above, a mapnik server needs to be more potent and the t...@h server cannot do that (nor am I willing to setup and maintain a mapnik&db replication infrastructure) So, unless someone is willing do do the above and as song as the current �...@h setup runs with a minimal amount of maintenance (currently basically none on my side), I don't see a reason to change anything. > - Does anyone care for the map layers t...@h produces? I can only say that we have about 4TB of tile downloads each months. So, that counts as a yes in my view... > - Is the way the layers are produced obsolete? > One strength of t...@h is its modular renderer. It is relatively easy to > implement another preprocessor to do some fancy rendering. How > feasible would it be to have mapnik render the maplint layer? That is a valid argument, not knowing mapnik, I cannot comment on that. > Another point for t...@h is the easy way to setup another render > instance. How do you do that with mapnik if you don't have a potent > server available? I see this as the most important issue. Yes, overall t...@h is less efficient than mapnik, but the efforts are distributed. The t...@h server is equipped with a meagre 4GB of RAM and no powerful CPU and is coping fine with what it currently does. > Yet another argument for t...@h is that it seems to work pretty well > since quite some time now. (I am not saying that mapnik doesn't.) > Why change a running system? It does not seem to require a huge > amount of maintenance. When people loose interest they will start > contributing and the tiles will become horribly outdated. Until then > I would not worry about purpose. agree spaetz _______________________________________________ Tilesathome mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tilesathome
