What does HackerNews think of PMTiles?

i think you can also directly call them from the maplibre lib itself using the pmtiles adapter

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/main/js/examples/m...

An exciting new standard here is pmtiles; a standardized way to store map tiles that can be used via http range requests. I believe planettiler has plans to add pmtiles output support as well.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Another option if you want to offload the tiles from embedded in your docker image to static file hosting would be to convert the mbtiles output to pmtiles [1]. Then just upload the pmtiles file to s3 or similar and use the maplibre plug-in to read tiles directly from that large file using byte range requests without a tile server.

There’s a python utility to convert mbtiles to pmtiles, but I’m also planning to add native pmtiles output to planetiler soon [2].

[1] https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

[2] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/98

Yep, it's inspired by COG as well as MBTiles, hence the name. Key differences are:

* like MBTiles it's agnostic to what individual tiles are. You can store vector data as SVG, Protobuf, raster PNGs, JPGs or even raw digital elevation models.

* It's not backwards compatible in the same way Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF is.

* It has a recursive index structure to avoid needing to load in huge indexes at once for large datasets (hundreds of millions of tiles).

* It is designed for remote HTTP range reads. If your application can instead directly access a filesytem, like on a mobile phone, MBTiles, which uses SQLite, is a more established solution.

The specification is open source on GitHub https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles and is still evolving in response to user needs. I've created direct client support for Leaflet and MapLibre, and plan to work on OpenLayers next.

> Why not upload those files separately,

Doing S3 put requests for 260M files every week would cost around $1300 USD/week which was too much for our budget

> or in ZIP format?

We looked at zip's but due to the way the header (well central file directory) was laid out it mean that finding a specific file inside the zip would require the system to download most of the CFD.

The zip CFD is basically a list of header entries where they vary in size of 30 bytes + file_name length, to find a specific file you have to iterate the CFD until you find the file you want.

assuming you have a smallish archive (~1 million files) the CFD for the zip would be somewhere in the order of 50MB+ (depending on filename length)

Using a hash index you know exactly where in the index you need to look for the header entry, so you can use a range request to load the header entry

  offset = hash(file_name) % slot_count

Another file format which is gaining popularity recently is PMTiles[1] which uses tree index, however it is specifically for tiled geospatial data.

[1] https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Fantastic. The renderer I was using was indeed leaflet based, so this sounds drop-in easy. I just read through https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles Nice work! The only downside would be that these maps are often re-rendered periodically and only have a few tiles that actually get updated. In that case, it’s nice to have to update only a handful of files. But I think the benefits would far outweigh the costs. Upload one massive file repeatedly is still gonna be faster I would think. Thanks!