How to improve and monitor MapTiler Server performance

We are running performance tests for vector tiles serving and rasterization. In these tests, tiles are served without any caching to obtain the raw server performance. Every VM runs a single MapTiler Server instance with a default rasterization configuration. The load was generated from 50 virtual users.

Performance tests results

Performance tips

• Configure caching in production is basically a must-have, see how to configure it in Nginx.
• More CPUs and RAM will be used mainly during map rasterization, if you serve vector/raster tiles, multiple CPUs will not help you much. Rather invest in fast SSD drives.
• Rasterization uses internal caching massively, if you use it for the whole planet (lots of fonts etc) 16 GB RAM is the minimum.
• The Rasterization performance can be tuned in server settings/rasterization. Setting renderer pool size higher than CPU count can slightly increase throughput but beware that every renderer allocates its own memory space.
• The raster size for Map raster tiles is either 256 or 512.
• The Static Maps have limits defined in Settings -> Static maps.

How to get the best rasterization performance

This configuration or higher will help you achieve the best rasterization performance
(making raster PNG/JPG images from OpenStreetMap dataset)

• 32 CPUs
• 128 GB RAM
• 200 GB of SSD storage for tiles, fonts, glyphs
• set up your own cache - NGINX
• MapTiler Server behind NGINX
• NGINX content caching
• NGINX caching guide
• Redis
• Memcache (using cache in memory for fast access)

Useful links

MapTiler Server Technical Specification
MapTiler Server behind NGINX