The twenty-fourth development diary marks the most significant milestone in OpenStreetMap-NG’s journey to date: the launch of our public test instance. After months of intensive development, we’re finally excited to show it all off! This isn’t just a technical achievement—it’s a pivotal moment in our mission to revolutionize open-source mapping.
🔖 You can read other development diaries here:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NorthCrab/diary/
⭐ This project is open-source — join us today:
https://github.com/openstreetmap-ng/openstreetmap-ng
🛈 This initiative is not affiliated with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
Public Test Instance Launch 🚀
OpenStreetMap-NG is now live for public testing at osm.ng. This milestone represents months of intensive development, optimization, and preparation to create a stable testing environment for the community. Every mapper, developer, and OpenStreetMap enthusiast can now experience what we’ve been envisioning as the next generation of mapping platforms.
The test environment runs completely independently from the main OpenStreetMap infrastructure. It features the complete OpenStreetMap dataset while providing a safe playground for experimentation and feedback. You can explore all the functionality without worrying about affecting live data—perfect for giving the platform a thorough evaluation.
Liftoff! We have a liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11.
CloudFerro Infrastructure Partnership
We’re grateful to CloudFerro for generously sponsoring the server infrastructure that powers osm.ng. We deliberately chose a medium-specification server (30GB RAM, 4 CPU cores; they offered more) for a specific reason: to make performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities clearly visible during testing. This strategic approach ensures that subtle bugs or inefficiencies don’t slip through due to overpowered hardware masking underlying issues. By testing on realistic hardware constraints, we can identify and resolve problems before they affect users more broadly.
Scalability Improvements
OpenStreetMap-NG now demonstrates exceptional scalability across diverse hardware configurations, thanks to extensive optimization work enabled by our test server access. The platform intelligently adapts to whatever resources are available, maximizing performance across different setups.
Memory scaling now works beautifully from 20GB RAM (the realistic minimum) all the way up to 128GB+ configurations. Processing adapts seamlessly from 4 CPU threads to 32+ core systems. Storage optimization handles everything from high-latency SSDs to directly-connected NVMe drives, dealing effectively with various bandwidth and latency conditions. This means OpenStreetMap-NG is accessible to organizations with modest infrastructure while still taking full advantage of powerful hardware when it’s available.
Dataset Loading Optimizations
Developer experience received a substantial boost through dramatic improvements in dataset loading performance. Initial local database pre-loading time dropped from 20 minutes to just 4 minutes—a remarkable 5x improvement while handling the same data volume! These kinds of optimizations remove friction from the development workflow, letting contributors iterate faster and experiment more freely with OpenStreetMap-NG’s hackable architecture.
The introduction of the speedup
Python C extension revolutionizes performance-critical operations by implementing them in optimized C code. This delivers substantial performance improvements across multiple system components.
We’ve also significantly optimized memory usage through several architectural changes. XML parsing now uses 75% less RAM thanks to string interning and SAX-style parsing, eliminating memory pressure during replication processing on our test server. Database objects were completely reimagined by removing SQLAlchemy abstraction layers in favor of pure Python dictionaries with TypedDict typing safety. This makes the entire platform more efficient across all operations.
Features and Stability
The public test launch includes several user-facing improvements that really enhance the experience. Dark mode support provides comfortable viewing in low-light conditions, while the new language selector improves accessibility for non-logged-in users across different locales. We’ve also implemented comprehensive stability improvements addressing various bugs identified during development.
Before going public, we ran a two-week intensive testing phase with our Discord community members. This helped ensure stability and catch critical issues before the public announcement—having that extra set of eyes made all the difference.
What Caused the 6-Month Delay?
We know many of you have been waiting patiently, and we want to be transparent about why this took six months. The delay reflects the genuine complexity of optimizing OpenStreetMap-NG for production-scale deployment. Scalability turned out to be the primary technical challenge, requiring careful architectural decisions to balance performance with resource constraints.
Memory management proved particularly tricky. We needed to find optimal allocation strategies for large datasets while maximizing efficiency on limited hardware. Each architectural change required extensive validation with full datasets, and sometimes the smallest modifications could produce week-long delays. The iterative optimization process was time-consuming, but it resulted in a fundamentally more robust platform that we’re confident can handle real-world deployment scenarios.
Earn Rewards 🎁
We’re launching something new: a bounty program to recognize valuable community contributions during the testing phase. We’re offering $5 for quality feedback that leads to improvements, limited to the first 100 qualifying testers. The top 10 most valuable contributions will get an additional $5 bonus, bringing their total reward to $10.
We’re especially interested in reproducible bug reports, performance issues, visual glitches, accessibility problems, and security concerns. But general usability feedback, feature improvement suggestions, and API compatibility issues for developers are also incredibly valuable.
Learn more about the bounty program.
The Future
With the test instance fully operational, OpenStreetMap-NG enters an exciting new phase focused on community feedback and refinement. The hackable system design philosophy we’ve built in enables rapid experimentation and component swapping, encouraging innovative approaches to mapping platform challenges.
We’re committed to integrating community feedback—incorporating tester suggestions and bug reports into ongoing development. We’ll also be monitoring performance closely, analyzing usage patterns to identify new optimization opportunities. This testing phase is more than just technical validation—it’s an opportunity for the OpenStreetMap community to help shape the platform’s future direction through hands-on experience and constructive feedback.
We are incredibly fortunate to have individuals and organizations who support OpenStreetMap-NG through their generous contributions. Their commitment powers our mission to revolutionize open-source mapping and helps maintain the project’s independence.
Public supporters on Liberapay and GitHub Sponsors. You can click the image below to open it in a new tab. From there, you can click on the avatars to see their profiles.

