From the Labs -- MetaCarta Labs Weblog

For the first time yesterday, the MetaCarta Labs WMS servers served more than 1 Million tiles in a 24 hour period.

A big part of this has been a large influx of visitors to the OpenLayers homepage from a link from meneame.net, a Spanish language equivilant of Digg. The OpenLayers home page has served about 10 times as many tiles as it does on an average day as a result: yesterday, 360,000 tiles were served for this page.

Our participation in FlashEarth has kept us serving a healthy 200,000 tiles a day. This is pretty standard — some days it’s higher, some days it’s lower, but that’s the average.

Both FlashEarth and the OpenLayers homepage serve WMS-C tiles, against our TileCache server. There’s also one other large tile user who doesn’t use this server: the WarWide OpenLayers-based war strategy game. Currently, they are using our slower WMS server to the tune of 300,000 tiles a day.

It’s not really any sweat for us: with the optimizations we have in place, the load on the tile server never really gets above 1 or 2. TileCache is a huge help in this regard: I don’t expect we would be able to serve the full load of rendering all the WMS images if we were rendering them all each time. In fact, I’d like to communicate with the people at WarWide that they should change to WMS-C, but my emails so far have gone ignored. The WMS-C server is on average about 10 times faster than the non-prerendered tiles, and I’d like to see everyone see as good of performance as is available for their use case.

Still, a million tiles a day — an average of 15 requests/second for the 24 hour period — is nothing to sneeze at.

TileCache 1.4 has been released.

Changes in this version include:

• Added wsgi handler, from Ehud Shabtai.
• Added standalone HTTP server, using wsgi handler, from Ehud Shabtai.
• Added fastcgi implementation, using wsgi handler, from Ehud Shabtai.
• Improved documentation, including patch from Eric Lemoine, Bill
  Woodall.
• Improved support for running as CGI under IIS, from Suki Hirata.
• Support for ‘maxResolution’ layer option.

TileCache is available from:

• TileCache Homepage
• .tar.gz
• .zip

About TileCache:
TileCache provides a Python-based WMS/TMS server, with pluggable caching mechanisms and rendering backends. In the simplest use case, TileCache requires only write access to a disk, the ability to run Python CGI scripts, and a WMS you want to be cached. With these resources, you can create your own local disk-based cache of any WMS server, and use the result in any WMS-C supporting client, like OpenLayers, or any TMS supporting client, like OpenLayers and worldKit.