So, my brother had an idea for which he needed a partial image of a street map in vector graphics.
And OpenStreetMaps can do exactly what he wants - you can export the current viewport of the map as an SVG.
However, OSM's export feature sometimes fails and it's also a commercial venue, so we thought it best to implement the whole thing on our own server. After all, it's OpenSource, so we can easily see how they done it, right?
Yeah.
So, first, the installation instructions for all the stuff involved (Mapnik, PostgreSQL + PostGIS, LeafLet, TileMill, ...) turn out to be a bit Byzantinic. I trucked through that, however, and then set out to import an actual map (of Germany, mind) onto the database. That particular map file was 3 GB in size.
For which I used a VirtualMachine of roughly the same proportions my brother will later on run: 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB of space.
I made the mistake of putting that one on a hard disc. Turns out, the import process involves a lot of small random access read/writes, so when I gave up and stopped the thing, five(5) days had passed and it was still not done.
So, next move: Put it on an SSD. Sped up the process at least 50-fold. Only to yield this:
An error occured.
Out of disc space.
Wut?
So, tomorrow I'll give it way more disc space and see how that goes. Geeze.
Of course, there's no indication anywhere in the instructions that the import process may take days if you put it onto a harddisc and that the map size balloons more than 2000%...
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Originally Posted by Loki
