Company
Date Published
Author
CARTO Contributors
Word count
1096
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Postgis team updated their MVT encoder technology, switching from node-mapnik to St_AsMVT in Postgis 2.5, to improve performance, reduce network load, and better support scalability. The transition was made to take advantage of the increased resources available on database servers, which allows for faster tile generation and reduces friction between users sharing resources. Despite some differences in behavior with invalid geometries and simplification, St_AsMVT has shown significant improvements in performance, especially for line and polygon geometries, while Postgis excels at discarding small polygons and handling attribute encoding. The update also highlights the importance of considering geometry size and property associations when generating vector tiles, as well as optimizing requests to reduce unnecessary columns and improving performance through point aggregations.