[Tilecache] whether to use tilecache to serve tiles

[Graham Carlyle]

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 11:47 +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2008 11:36 AM, Graham Carlyle <graham.carlyle at maplecroft.com> wrote:
> > Is the tilecache disk cache directory structure compliant with a TMS
> > url?
> 
> No. The problem with the TMS URL is that at high zoom levels there
> will be tens of thousands of files per directory, and not all
> filesystems handle that equally wel. So TC uses a structure that
> limits the files per directory to 1000 and mostly there are less...

Fair enough but it still seems it would be useful for those people who
aren't constrained by this. Hosting on Amazon S3 would be possible as it
places no limit on the number of items it can serve from the same
(simulated) directory. Also maybe in these "many tiles" circumstances
you would be less likely to want to pre-generate the tiles anyway as it
would take too long. 

> > If not then maybe an additional disk cache implementation that did
> > achieve this would be useful. That way you could start out just using
> > tilecache with on-demand generation and then swap to serving the images
> > directly from the cache filesystem if you wanted to.
> 
> People have done such tricks using apache rewrite rules. The format is
> fairly simple.

Ok but this still needs a reasonable amount of control/config of the web
server. Being able to use tilecache to create a tiled map that can be
served on any webspace seems a useful capability. 

Actually I just realised after browsing the OpenLayers website that it
supports requesting images from a web hosted tilecache file cache anyway
which is good enough for me as i'm using OpenLayers to display the
tilecache generated maps :)

Graham