[bdon]

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 interesting use case for tiles in Btrfs volumes and incremental updates, which I haven't tackled in PMTiles yet!

[hyperknot]

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.

[bdon]

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.

[tecleandor]

You both specify the filesystem to be Btrfs. Is there any advantage in this case against ZFS, ext4, XFS... or is it just a practical choice?

[preya2k]

I would also like to see this comparison. And for good measure it’d be great to also include Versatiles in this comparison.

[bdon]

If you would like to run this comparison for tileservers reading from disk, I wrote a small tool to simulate traffic based on access logs of OpenStreetMap tiles:

https://github.com/bdon/TileSiege