A better way to manage millions of map tiles

The current open source tile cache implementations all use the file system for managing tiles. Each tile is a single file stored into a common directory hierarchy. It is a pragmatic approach, easy to implement and with good performance, but it is limited. Managing millions of small files is inefficient with most file systems. The time to remove tile sets, calculate cache sizes or sync caches between differens hosts quickly becomes large enough to be impractical.

This talk will show other existing and new approaches. It will present benchmarks comparing the existing file system based approach with prototypes based on SQLite and other storages as a backend.

It will also discuss the requirements for a new tile store format: What are possible use cases? How could a format be extended? Can we share a format/implementation between tile servers?