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PMTiles could come up with a version in the future where instead of one 90 GB file, they have 9 thousand 10 MB files. That would work well I believe.

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The latency for small files and ranges of large files is pretty similar on most storage platforms, but there are some exceptions like Cloudflare R2.

The main reason PMTiles is one file and not two or more files is that it enables atomic updates in-place (which every mature storage platform supports) as well as ETag content change detection in downstream caches. All of the server and serverless implementations at http://github.com/protomaps support this now for AWS, S3-compatible storage, Google Cloud, and Azure.

Now I'm curious, what causes the latency for range requests with R2?

I don't have any insight into this other than observing how their storage system works, but here's some scripts I made last year to test:

https://github.com/bdon/cloudflare-r2-latency

Range requests means work and logic. Getting a file requires no logic.

Also, I'm pretty sure range requests are going to be difficult to cache. That implies going to origin every request which is bad.

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