Overture accelerates tile generation with Planetiler migration
Overture has switched the tool they use to create pmtiles from tippecanoe to planetiler. A change that yields impressive results.
Brandon Liu:
As Overture has grown, these tilesets have grown in size and take longer to generate. Prior to the April release, the tilesets for the places and divisions themes were created using the tippecanoe tool.
Tippecanoe is a powerful C++ command line utility for creating tilesets. Tippecanoe’s algorithms adaptively create low-zoom tiles by processing all features. This makes it convenient for visualizing data without configuration, but means that the large themes like Places took over one hour to generate.
From the April release onward, tilesets are created with Java code using the planetiler library. Instead of considering all features at each zoom, features are filtered to zoom levels by type. This requires more explicit feature selection, but means tilesets can be generated in a fraction of the time. […]
The Places theme tileset creation went from over 2 hours to ~5 minutes. The Divisions tileset creation went from 48 minutes to under 20 minutes.
On top of that, they changed how they manage their tile-generation infrastructure and open-sourced it. Using terraform-aws-overture-tiles, you can now create customised tile sets from Overture data and even enhance it with other data.