Tile Disk Usage

Average tile size is 633 B on tile - March 2011.

OSM does NOT pre-render every tile. Pre-rendering all tiles would use around 54000GB of storage. As the following table shows, the majority of tiles are never viewed. In fact just 1.79% are viewed. It works out this way because the majority of tiles are at zoom level 18 and actually the majority contain nothing of interest. By following an on-the-fly rendering approach we can avoid rendering these tiles unnecessarily. The tile view count column shows how many tiles have been produced on the OSM Tile server.

Tile server disk usage: 1272GB used. (6 Jan 2012). (z0 to z15: 252GB, z16 to z18: 1020GB)

Zoom	Tile view count	Maximum (4^zoom)	% viewed on tile (March 2011)	Newer value % viewed on tile
0	1	1	100
1	4	4	100
2	16	16	100
3	64	64	100
4	256	256	100
5	1,024	1,024	100
6	4,096	4,096	100
7	16,384	16,384	100
8	65,536	65,536	100
9	262,144	262,144	100
10	1,048,576	1,048,576	100
11	4,194,304	4,194,304	100
12	13,475,072	16,777,216	80.32
13	35,640,512	67,108,864	53.11
14	87,820,928	268,435,456	32.72
15	163,872,384	1,073,741,824	15.26
16	287,448,064	4,294,967,296	6.69
17	429,535,936	17,179,869,184	2.50
18	617,515,264	68,719,476,736	0.90
Total	1,640,900,565	91,625,968,981	1.79