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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

openfreemap.org

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Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#111
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the ping is 150 ms to us-west-2, and the tiles load in like 5 seconds on a cold start. Of course we cannot test cold start on HN comments because HN is the definition of hot :-) I can imagine workers to be fast, it's the range requests which are super slow. It's also outside of your control, it depends on how Cloudflare and S3 handles range requests to 90 GB files. I think if you could make PMTiles split into fil…

I agree, there are tradeoffs to using static storage - the intended audience for PMTiles is those that prefer using static sites instead of administering a Linux server. I would be interested to see a comparison of Btrfs + nginx serving latency, vs `pmtiles serve` from https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles on a PMTiles archive on disk. That would be a more direct comparison. I think there's potentially some interes…

I think both solutions could easily saturate a 1 Gbps line. I benchmarked Btrfs + nginx and it could do 30 Gbps, which doesn't really make a difference if your server is 1 Gbps only.

The fact that there is no service running was the more important for me. Mostly for security and bugs. I had so many problems with various tile servers in production, they needed daily restarting, they had memory leaks, etc.

Basically I wanted to go nginx-only for security and to avoid tile server bugs.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a full planet OSM extract is about 300 million binary files, in total about 90 GB. The most popular ways to store it: - MBTiles - an SQLite file, each file is a row in a table, you need a server to serve it. - PMTiles - a single file, optimised for serverless usage. - Extract them into a directory, which in practice should be on a partition image. This is the approach I choose. I tested ext4 and Btrfs and I choose…

I apologize if this is something stupid, or answered elsewhere, but is there a good way to trim Planet down to a smaller area? I've been making some custom map stuff for mountain bike trails and I'd really like to move to self-hosted vector tiles for all layers, but too much of what I find says to start with Planet.osm when all I really need is a State (in the US) or even a few-miles-wide area. (My goal is to basical…

If you know the tile numbers, you can just copy them out of the Btrfs image.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#114
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, there are tradeoffs to using static storage - the intended audience for PMTiles is those that prefer using static sites instead of administering a Linux server. I would be interested to see a comparison of Btrfs + nginx serving latency, vs `pmtiles serve` from https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles on a PMTiles archive on disk. That would be a more direct comparison. I think there's potentially some interes…

I think both solutions could easily saturate a 1 Gbps line. I benchmarked Btrfs + nginx and it could do 30 Gbps, which doesn't really make a difference if your server is 1 Gbps only. The fact that there is no service running was the more important for me. Mostly for security and bugs. I had so many problems with various tile servers in production, they needed daily restarting, they had memory leaks, etc. Basically I…

I see, I think that's a good approach to enable serving with stock nginx as well as for companies that are built on Nginx or a plain HTTP serving stack already.

For PMTiles the module is loadable directly as a Caddy plugin (https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/server#caddyfile) which I prefer to nginx for security and bugs (and automatic SSL), and also enables serving PMTiles from disk or a remote storage bucket without a separate service running.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#115
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a full planet OSM extract is about 300 million binary files, in total about 90 GB. The most popular ways to store it: - MBTiles - an SQLite file, each file is a row in a table, you need a server to serve it. - PMTiles - a single file, optimised for serverless usage. - Extract them into a directory, which in practice should be on a partition image. This is the approach I choose. I tested ext4 and Btrfs and I choose…

This sounds like a perfect application for EROFS[1]. While it comes from an embedded systems background, it has seen some usage in container use cases and is moving towards a general "mountable tar" application. It would also avoid the tedium you have to go through in shrink_btrfs.py because you can just generate the image out of a tree. I wanted to give repackaging the btrfs image a shot but the download was pretty…

Thanks a lot, I didn't know about it! I also liked the fact that Btrfs is probably super well tested in the Linux kernel by now.

btrfs.openfreemap.com just a public Cloudflare bucket, no idea why it might be slow.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#116
post #88

Related : I'm building https://github.com/laem/cartes , an alternative to Google Maps. On top of a custom protomaps tileset and a few other MapTiler options (such as satellite and hiking), it packs a search engine, a basic OSM place UI, transit calculators (walk, bike with profiles, transit, car), small features like ruler and favorites, transit maps, photos of places, place search by categories, and the French open…

Wow, now that's an ambitious project! I wish you a lot of success with it!

Thanks ! It consists of using more focus initiatives like yours and bdon's :)

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#117
post #88

Related : I'm building https://github.com/laem/cartes , an alternative to Google Maps. On top of a custom protomaps tileset and a few other MapTiler options (such as satellite and hiking), it packs a search engine, a basic OSM place UI, transit calculators (walk, bike with profiles, transit, car), small features like ruler and favorites, transit maps, photos of places, place search by categories, and the French open…

Wow this is one of the best Google Maps clones I've seen so far. Is there a plan to translate the UI into other languages than French? I would be willing to help out, if there is a Weblate interface or something similar.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#118

I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same off…

To be honest I don't see the problem with making commercial use non-free.

(a) They're making millions, you deserve a cut of that.

(b) If making money makes you more likely to be around in 10 years, that's attractive to businesses. Nobody knows when your donations might suddenly dry up.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#119
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a perfect application for EROFS[1]. While it comes from an embedded systems background, it has seen some usage in container use cases and is moving towards a general "mountable tar" application. It would also avoid the tedium you have to go through in shrink_btrfs.py because you can just generate the image out of a tree. I wanted to give repackaging the btrfs image a shot but the download was pretty…

Thanks a lot, I didn't know about it! I also liked the fact that Btrfs is probably super well tested in the Linux kernel by now. btrfs.openfreemap.com just a public Cloudflare bucket, no idea why it might be slow.

> I also liked the fact that Btrfs is probably super well tested in the Linux kernel by now.

btrfs has certainly been around for longer, but in my (embedded systems only) experience, EROFS has been pretty solid - it's slowly being picked up by Android, so it is definitely seeing a lot of use in the wild (probably surpassing btrfs by the number of installations already).

> btrfs.openfreemap.com just a public Cloudflare bucket, no idea why it might be slow.

I'm getting 30 MiB/s (on a gigabit uplink) - not great, not terrible. A .torrent would be nice but I guess outside of being on the HN front page full-planet downloads by different people won't synchronize enough for this to be useful (and using web seeds is problamtic in its own right with small-ish chunks).

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#120

I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same off…

Do you think it'd be more clear to only accept donations on GitHub Sponsors and only offer actual support plans on the website? I mean actual email support, helping companies migrate their existing map stack to OpenFreeMap.

If you aren't doing this for a living and getting paid for it, or having someone else do it, you should reconsider either A) providing the support or B) how you make money.

You may think it noble to "only take donations" just to pay the hosting cost, etc. but providing people support is a completely different thing. People are stupid, needy and inconsiderate of your time, feelings and experience.

If you don't want to run ads, great! But your time should be compensated fairly as well. You should be charging businesses for things, with a substantial cost for substantial work. Charging a business is not the same as charging an end user and you should not be averse to doing so.

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