alt Hacker NewsIs it always/only 'laziness' (derogatory, i know) when caching isn't implemented by a site like wplace.live ? Why wouldn't they save openfreemap all the traffic when a caching server on their side presumably could serve tiles almost as fast or faster than openfreemap?
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I actually have a direct answer for this: priorities. I run a fairly popular auction website and we have map tiles via stadia maps. We spend about $80/month on this service for our volume. We definitely could get this cost down to a lower tier by caching the tiles and serving them from our proxy. However we simply haven’t yet had the time to work on this, as there is always some other task which is higher priority.
We are talking about an insane amount of data here. It was 56 Gbit/s (or 56 x 1 Gbit servers 100% saturated!). This is not something a "caching server" could handle. We are talking on the order of CDN networks, like Cloudflare, to be able to handle this.
It looks like a fun website, not a for-profit website. The expectations and focus of fun websites is more to just get it working than to handle the scale. It sounds like their user base exploded overnight, doubling every 14 hours or so. It also sounds like it’s other a solo dev or a small group based on the maintainers wording.
Why should they when openfreemap is behind a CDN and their home page says things like:
> Using our public instance is completely free: there are no limits on the number of map views or requests. There’s no registration, no user database, no API keys, and no cookies. We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.
> Is commercial usage allowed?
> Yes.
IMHO, reading this and then just using it, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you could put a cache infront of their CDN, but why, when they said it's all good, no limits, for free?
I might wonder a bit, if I knew the bandwidth it was using, but I might be busy with other stuff if my site went unexpectedly viral.