Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Yup but super impressive just how much faster Martin was than all the other competition by significant margins with Bbox (Rust) and Tegola (Go) trailing at ~2-4x slower. That indicates the author(s) of Martin really optimized the data structures & algorithms to achieve a new Pareto frontier. Neat - would be nice if there were an accessible summary of the tricks employed to make it so fast that were missing in competitors.

View on HN

The trick that makes Martin so fast is not doing any geospatial processing, and just being focused on making quick, non-blocking requests to Postgres. All geospatial processing is done by PostGIS, which is essentially just using the C++ geos library (which is by far the most comprehensive and well optimized geospatial processing library).

Martin has an in-memory tile cache, which probably makes a difference: https://github.com/maplibre/martin/pull/1105. BBOX caches to a file instead.

The benchmarking repository has config files used for the test, and they did not use the tile cache feature.

It defaults to 512MiB if not configured explicitly to 0 which it’s not in the repository.

Oh that’s interesting, and I’m actually kinda peeved by any database-connected system that caches responses by default. Caching should be reserved as a performance optimization with serious correctness tradeoffs.

Regardless, I don’t think caching came into play here, at least according to how I’m reading this repository. I would expect cold caches for everything.

Yeah, that's definitely interesting - I'm surprised there is so much room for variation considering PostGIS is (if I'm not mistaken) doing most of the work.

I couldn't find any description of what test 1, 2, 3 etc actually are though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com