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Comment by cullenking | Hacker News Reader

Nice work! I run ridewithgps.com and am responsible for all our mapping and routing. If you ever want to pick my brain about anything related to bike software, and of course grapphopper / vector tiles, feel free to reach out, email is in my profile. I'm actually about to dive into fixing up some custom graphhopper routing profiles today for some new route planner updates we are about to release!

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Oh wow, that's amazing - thank you! I really appreciate your offer and I love RWGPS. I just read your comment about about all the hardware you're using at RWGPS and it's clear you're operating on a completely different scale than I am :D Right now, I'm just running Graphhopper on a €40/month Hetzner server and free tiers on Vercel and Maptiler. Though I already hit the free-tier limits for Maptiler so I'm quickly setting up a Martin server to server Europe mbtiles on some cheap server instead. Once the traffic drops after this HN post I think a low-cost server should do the trick for now.

As for Graphhopper, I ran into some challenges during the Europe-wide import stage. It turns out 64GB of RAM wasn’t enough, so I ended up spinning up a 128GB instance on AWS. After tweaking some config settings and following the deployment guide, I finally got it working. I also had to change the source code a bit to link each "official bike route" edge to its corresponding OSM relation info but I managed to get it working in the end(using KVStorage and KValues).

For now, my planner is pretty basic, so I don’t want to bombard you with beginner-level questions. But if something more complex comes up down the road, I’ll definitely take you up on your offer to reach out. Thanks again—I really appreciate your help and generosity!

I frequently use RWGPS for planning my bike rides but don't pay for it (yet!). Curious - is all routing done by graphhopper or do you have some secret sauce on your end? Also graphhopper web has regular bike mode and "racing bike", they tend to come up with different routes, wondering if it's incorporated on your side somehow or if there is a way to influence RWGPS algorithm to be more "road cycling" vs casual cycling (I think that's what graphhopper means by "racing").

We have an update to our web and mobile route planners coming out in the next month that adds more specific bike profiles, including paved/unpaved preferences and cycling infrastructure preferences. Maybe an MTB profile as well.

We use graphhopper for everything, with customized profiles. We add data to the weekly planet PBF files from the OSM project for additional routing data not present in OSM.

Thanks, looking forward! I don't know where most of your users are, but coming up with a safe road bike route in US suburbia is not a trivial problem. Current RWGPS planner routinely wants to take me to very dangerous roads (for a road cyclist). I hope your update will make it better.

MTB would be most welcome :)

It’s nice to see so many founders here. I run travelmap.net and I can also help out with self-hosting custom map tiles or tracing itineraries on Mapbox/Maplibre maps.

Thank you, appreciate it! Travelmap looks awesome—I love the idea. I will definitely try it out on my next trip.

This morning, I picked up an affordable m920q with 64GB of RAM and I’m planning to use it for hosting GH and maybe vector tiles too. If I run into any issues I can’t figure out quickly I’ll reach out but I don’t want to bug you with basic questions.

I have a stack of about 10 older dual xeon based supermicro 1u machines with 512gb of ram....if you are in the oregon area you can have any number of them for free! infini-ram makes life easier when dealing with OSM data.

Oh man, that's sweet! Thank you. I would be at your door by now but I'm located 8000 km away from Oregon :D I just received a tiny M920Q, and 64 GB of RAM should arrive tomorrow. I'll have to make do with it for now :D

Nowadays the cheapest way to self-host planet vector tiles is probably to use protomaps.com and throw the .pmtiles file on a S3 bucket (AWS, Cloudflare, etc.).

You are doing the lord's work. I love this website! - particularly that it preserves an in progress route when I exit and return to my planning session.

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