[drmidnight]

The approach I took for a recent project was to generate raster tiles for 0-7 zoom levels on the server. This is done in the data pipeline when new data becomes available. I then load the dataset into memory on the tile server and any requests for zoom 8 and above will generate tiles on the fly and cache them for other requests.

Its worked out very well so far, but I'm working with time series that adds a new set of data every 5 minutes so I need the "on the fly" approach. After some heavy optimization it's become quite fast and often the generated tiles are returned before the base map layer is.

The upside is that it works with any map system that supports raster tiles, so any platform really.