Issues Rendering OpenStreetMap Carto Tiles After Deployment

General talk
1

Hi all,

I’ve recently deployed OpenStreetMap Carto for rendering tiles on my server, following the official (wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto) for the setup. The initial installation went smoothly, but after a couple of days, I started noticing rendering issues with some of the map features. Some areas aren’t displaying as they should, and certain zoom levels appear to be missing elements like roads and labels.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Checked the Mapnik and CartoCSS configuration – everything seems in order.
  • Cleared the cache and re-rendered the tiles multiple times, but the issue persists.
  • Verified the PostgreSQL/PostGIS database connections are stable.

The errors I’m encountering seem sporadic and occur at various zoom levels, and sometimes the areas that are affected are completely different from what was working the day before. I’m especially concerned that the tiles are being generated incorrectly, possibly due to an issue with the database schema or Mapnik settings.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with OSM Carto tiles after deployment? Any suggestions on how to debug or resolve this? I’d appreciate any guidance, especially if it’s related to the rendering order or database settings.

Thanks in advance!

2

The first question I guess is what have you actually deployed - the version of OSM Carto at OSM, or the “next” version as being developed on github?

OSM Carto is / has changed from using the pgsql backend of osm2pgsql to the flex backend, with a different database structure. I’ve no idea whether the wiki page you followed knows about that. More reliable resources may be the github documentation at OSM Carto itself, or the switch2osm.org documentation (which uses a pgsql backend for now).

Another question is are you consuming minutely or other updates?

That said, if tiles used to render and they don’t now then you ought to be able to look at what is failing. The switch2osm.org guides explain how to enable sensible levels of debug and you should be able to see that in syslog or via journalctl or similar.

An “intermittent” problem might be “out of memory”, so that is something else to look out for.