Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Brion
Vibber<brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Static maps of arbitrary size presumably have
much the same problem here as the map tile images. How is it handled there?"
The same way I want to do static map generation. Just put an arbitrary
expiry time on it & serve it to the client.
Handy that!
It might be
good to use a Google Maps Static-like model here; the
MediaWiki end can just make itself an <img> and stick all the relevant
info onto the URL, calling out to the static map server.
That's a very good idea, but I'd been assuming that I wouldn't be able
to do that -- that each apache server was supposed to do things like
EasyTimeline generation / image rescaling and likewise static map
generation on its own & write it to the shared image NFS.
But just being able to call out to an existing server makes things a
whole lot easier.
Yep... this way is usually easier to manage for us, and also helps to
isolate services for performance and security reasons. If the map
rendering goes crazy and uses ten bajillion gigs of RAM and disk space,
we don't want that taking down the site. :) If it's isolated and nothing
depends on synchronous result returns, then you just don't get new maps
until it's fixed.
For things like the PDF rendering where we need to be able to return
data through the main web servers, isolation is still better -- we just
need a timeout on fetches to make sure we don't get a million reqs stuck
if the service hangs.
This also means that we can set up the Wikimedia
Deutschland servers
to do tile rendering and then easily test it on a big wiki (like
dewiki) by just enabling the SlippyMap extension which won't do
anything more fancy than point static/tile URLs to the external
service.
So yay!
:D
Either storing
it on local disk there or simply leaving it to be cached by upper-level squids
Throwing it at the squids and making it their problem would be simpler
for *me* at least.
Hehehe...
-- brion