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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

their demo isn't doing them any favors since it seems to stop at some random zoomlevel, eliding the kind of detail that I'd care about if I were evaluating that solution

digging into their GH repos surfaces https://protomaps.github.io/PMTiles/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fr2-pu... which is at least more detailed if not quite a GMaps killer

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I agree, if it weren't for your comment, I was about to ditch it as a candidate because it stopped zooming at a bad level. But your link shows that it contains a tremendous amount of data.

Edit: And I missed parents link to https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map which is actually better.

I just updated https://protomaps.com it to use the more detailed file you found, thanks. So instead of a zoom level of 12 it should work down to 20+ - the actual dataset contains up to zoom 15, which is ~1 billion tiles in a single 110GB file.

It's important to me that I showcase the system working as advertised - you are free to download the 110GB file from that static storage with no restrictions. Unfortunately, the demo is slow because I'm hosting it on Cloudflare R2 which has no outgoing bandwidth fees. Before, it was on DigitalOcean Spaces, which is low latency but would cost me $1-2 out of my own pocket each time someone clicked the link.

The Lambda/Workers integration as described in the other comment is the preferred solution to this for developers operating this at planet scale. Of course, the static storage solution is perfect for small to medium-sized areas, even on GitHub Pages.

I just wanted to say thank you for everything you've done for Protomaps. It was very easy to get started with and other than a small Vue/ES6-related issue I was able to get it integrated into my codebase very quickly.

> Unfortunately, the demo is slow because I'm hosting it on Cloudflare R2 which has no outgoing bandwidth fees.

Can you expand on this a little? Cloudflare is supposed to be pretty competent as CDN and with caching.

This is Cloudflare's new blob storage product R2. Putting the free Cloudflare CDN and cache infront of R2 doesn't work with HTTP Range headers, likely for product differentiation from their Video CDN. The latency of R2 is also much higher than S3 or GCP, but I know the R2 team is working hard on improving this.

FWIW you can add your own caching logic with Workers, if the CDN for some reason doesn't do Range. The Cache API exposed to Workers is quite useful.

That is exactly how the open source Workers integration works:

https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn/cloudflare

However, it is an optional acceleration layer on top of the PMTiles access pattern; and it doesn't make a compelling demo, it's just a Z/X/Y layer which is how map tiles have worked for the past 20 years.

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