You may have noticed that for the last few months, some operations that fetch map data (generate map; add points of interest) have either been very slow or have failed completely. Both of these operations rely on OpenStreetMap’s Overpass service, and this service has found itself completely overwhelmed by various third party apps. Oomap is not a big data requestor but it has still found itself having its usage throttled to help manage the larger workload.

I have been trying to mitigate this in various ways – sharing the load between multiple public servers (all such servers are now either in the same position or serve stale data), or switching to a totally different data source such as Slice (often works but has also seen regular downtime).

My current solution has been to switch to a paid Overpass service for both map data and fetching of points of interest. This seems to be working so far… If necessary, map generation will fall back to using Slice when needed. The source of the data for your particular map is recorded in the custom properties of the generated PDF.

Oomap relies on OpenStreetMap data and has made donations to recognise the value of this data source. I am very grateful to the individuals and groups that donate to Oomap to help fund my costs; you may also wish to support the enterprise that has built the dataset on which Oomap (and many of our events) relies.