Foundation/AGM21/Election to Board/Answers and manifestos/Q14 OSM Carto rendering cycle on zoom levels 1-12

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OSM Carto rendering cycle on zoom levels 1-12

A very specific question from a contributor: OSM Carto renders usually once a month on zoom levels 1-12. They and others would like it to be done more often, perhaps weekly. Sometimes there are huge multipolygon (forest, or farmland, or glacier etc) additions, or it may happen that some mappers break the multipolygon and it'd be great if we didn't have to use the dirty tiles all the time, because it's annoying and slow to do. But in the OSM ecosphere it is up to the maintainers. As a board member would you get involved and if so what would you do?


Guillaume Rischard

That’s a very specific question! It’s always a compromise: render zoom levels 1-12 more often, and you will have to do something else less often. What’s the cost of rendering something, and is it worth it? This is the kind of questions that’s not only made by the osm-carto style maintainers but also the Operations Working Group, which is always looking for volunteers. Looking at the renderd graphs though, I wonder if the low zoom tiles could be rendered a bit more at low priority at night, when the servers are less busy?

Michal Migurski

As a board member, I would not get involved in this discussion. As a maintainer of the Daylight Map Distribution project (https://daylightmap.org/) I can point out that we make available a monthly release of OSM data whose multipolygon relations have been tested and fixed, and that this would make an excellent data source for a monthly z1-z12 render.

Amanda McCann

Although i've set up many many tile servers, I don't know the specifics of this incidence, and I would defer to the tile server sysadmins. If they need anything from the board, I'd be happy to write that cheque.

Mikel Maron

In general, the OSMF empowers maintainers of software projects in our ecosystem. I'm not familiar enough with the rendering stack to know what factors are considered in the current rendering cycle for low zoom tiles. No I wouldn't get involved myself as a Board member. My focus is going to be elsewhere. I would say that if resources would be helpful here, then there should be various mechanisms available for the OSMF to provide support.

Roland Olbricht

This would be a good project for the Operational Working Group or for the Engineering Working Group. It is not a board matter. Does the person who has asked the question contacted the Operational Working Group for this question?

Bryan Housel

Having stuff on the map appear broken for up to a month is clearly bad for our project...

I mentioned in my answer to the “technology gaps” question that we could do more to encourage a “culture of testing”, and I think this is a good example - we should look for ways to speed up the tile generation so that people get faster feedback about whether the map is correct.

As a board member I probably wouldn’t get involved in this particular issue, but rather trust in the Operations Working Group (OWG) to decide how best to prioritize their resources.
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Operations_Working_Group


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