Hi
During the last weeks a lot of things happened to the tile-toolserver server. There's still progress going on but I'd like to give you a short status update:
ptolemy now uses tirex instead of renderd This change was done last weekend, mainly for performance reasons, but it also enlarged the number of tools that are available to manage the rendering server (batch render & co.) Comprehensive tutorials on how a new style can be added to the tileserver are tbd.
ptolemy is now visible in the munin graphs Some statistics of munin are now available at http://munin.toolserver.org/OSM/ptolemy/index.html but there are still some old in (renderd) as well as some missing (postgres) and some corrupted (replication_delay2). I'm working on consolidating the list of munin plugins and fixing the bugs.
fallback for default style The default style which is visible by default on http://toolserver.org/~osm/styles/ is now using a fallback routine that makes the browser weitch to the osm.org tiles when our toolserver can't render the tiles quickly enough. At the moment there are lots of places where we don't have any tiles yet on the disk. Those areas need to be rendered completely out-of-nothing when a visitor first views that area. This fallback will help in making the period until we have a comprehensive set of pre-rendered tiles less painful for our visitors.
Peter