Zh-hans:Slippy Map

OpenStreetMap "Standard" tile server

Mapnik is the rendering software used for generating the "standard" OpenStreetMap style. Mapnik also powers many third parties renderings including the Cycle Map and Transport Map styles which are Featured tiles shown on the front page slippy map.

The standard tiles are generated on tile.openstreetmap.org. The OpenStreetMap standard tile server database is updated with minute diffs, so that most data changes should get rendered within a few minutes. In the past this server was updated solely based on a weekly Planet.osm dump, which is performed on a Wednesday morning (GMT/BST). Imagine having to wait that long to see your map edits appearing? Those were the days! The full planet dump is still imported occasionally to correct any quirks in the applying of diffs.

The Mapnik rendering for OpenStreetMap is run via an Apache module called mod tile, developed especially for OSM's high-performance needs. This also manages caching and queueing for re-render requests. Every tile has a time stamp for when it was rendered and a dirty flag signifying that it is ready to be rendered again. The renderer follows these rules:

• If we have an change in the OSM Database the system tries to mark the corresponding tile "dirty".
• Whenever you look at a tile, it's checked if it is older than three days. In that case it is marked "dirty".
• A background rendering process renders all dirty tiles.

Thus if nobody is looking at an area it won't get rerendered often. Tiles are rendered on a (sort-of) interest/attention-first basis. Marking a tile dirty does not mark all subtiles as dirty.

If you get 'More OpenStreetMap coming soon...' on a tile, it means there was no data for that tile and the server was not able to render it on-demand. It is now in the queue to be rendered. You can find the status of a tile through the URL* of the tile:

• https://tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/42.png

Simply add /status at the end ...

• https://tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/42.png/status

... to get its creation time stamp and dirty status.

If you explicitly want to force the rendering of a tile, you can mark it as dirty by appending /dirty to the URL:

• https://tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/42.png/dirty

*) In the context menu of the Firefox you select "View Page Info" and copy the URL of the tile in the "Media" tab. Internet Explorer provides "Analyze element" (or something) only. Select it and right-click the highlighted code section in the DOM-Explorer. Copy/paste it into the address bar and remove everything expect from the PNG URL.

Tiles@Home

In the past we were offering another featured layer called "Osmarender" which used the Osmarender rendering system running on a distributed rendering set-up called Tiles@home. This project was discontinued and the "Osmarender" layer is no longer available, although you can do one-off renders still using Osmarender.