This month we’ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier
and faster. There’s also a small technical change in that requests for a “…latest” file will now be answered with a
HTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post).
I would like to use this opportunity to appeal to users of the download server to “download responsibly”. We want
to continue offering this service as powerful and as convenient as possible within our means. We want everyone
to have easy access to the latest OSM data in a form that is useful to them.
Every now and then, people break things for others. There have been individual clients downloading the exact same
20-GB file 100s of times per day, for several days in a row. (Just the other day, one user has managed to download almost 10,000 copies of the italy-latest.osm.pbf file in 24 hours!) Others download every single file we have on the
server, every day. There’s a limit to the outgoing network bandwidth, and behaviour like this means that
things are slowing down for everyone. Also, when we block an IP range for abuse, innocent third parties can be affected.
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