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=Tile splitter for mkgmap=

The format used for Garmin maps has, in effect, a maximum size, meaning that
you have to split an .osm file that contains large well mapped regions into a
number of smaller tiles. This program does that.  There are at least two
stages of processing required. The first stage is to calculate what area each
tile should cover, based on the distribution of nodes. The second stage writes
out the nodes, ways and relations from the original .osm file into separate
smaller .osm files, one for each area that was calculated in stage one. With
option keep-complete=true, two additional stages are used to avoid broken ways
and polygons. 

The two most important features are:

* Variable sized tiles so that you don't get a large number of tiny files.
* Tiles join exactly with no overlap or gaps.

== First ==

You will need a lot of memory on your computer if you intend to split a large
area. A few options allow to configure how much memory you need.  With the
default parameters, you need about 4-5 bytes for every node and way. This
doesn't sound a lot but there are about 1700 million nodes in the whole planet
file and so you cannot process the whole planet in one pass file on a 32 bit
machine using this utility as the maximum java heap space is 2G. It is
possible with 64 bit java and about 7GB of heap or with multiple passes.

The Europe extract from Cloudmade or Geofabrik can be processed within the 2G
limit if you have sufficient memory. With the default options europe is split
into about 750 tiles. The Europe extract is about half of the size of the
complete planet file.

On the other hand a single country, even a well mapped one such as Germany or
the UK, will be possible on a modest machine, even a netbook.

== Download ==

Download from the [http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/download/splitter.html splitter download directory]

The source code is available from subversion: at http://svn.mkgmap.org.uk/splitter/trunk

== Usage ==

Splitter requires java 1.6 or higher. Run the following. If you have less than
2G of memory on your computer you should reduce the -Xmx argument

 java -Xmx2000m -jar splitter.jar file.osm > splitter.log

This will produce a number of .osm.pbf files that can be read by mkgmap.
There are also other files produced:

The ''template.args'' file is a file that can be used with the -c option of
mkgmap that will compile all the files. You can use it as is or you can copy
it and edit it to include your own options. For example instead of each
description being "OSM Map" it could be "NW Scotland" as appropriate.

The ''areas.list'' file is the list of bounding boxes that were calculated. If
you want you can use this on a subsequent call the the splitter using the
--split-file option to use exactly the same areas as last time. This might be
useful if you produce a map regularly and want to keep the tile areas the same
from month to month. It is also useful to avoid the time it takes to
regenerate the file each time (currently about a third of the overall time
taken to perform the split). Of course if the map grows enough that one of the
tiles overflows you will have to re-calculate the areas again.

The ''areas.poly'' file contains the bounding polygon of the calculated areas.
See option --polygon-file how this can be used.

The ''densities-out.txt'' file is written when no split-file is given and
contains debugging information only. 

You can also use a gzip'ed or bz2'ed compressed .osm file as the input file.
Note that this can slow down the splitter considerably (particularly true for
bz2) because decompressing the .osm file can take quite a lot of CPU power. If
you are likely to be processing a file several times you're probably better
off converting the file to one of the binary formats pbf or o5m. The o5m
format is faster to read, but requires more space on the disk.

== Options ==

There are a number of options to fine tune things that you might want to try.

; --cache=
:   Deprecated, now does nothing.

;--description=OSM Map
:  Sets the desciption to be written in to the template.args file.

;--geonames-file=
:  The name of a GeoNames file to use for determining tile names.
Typically cities15000.zip from
[http://download.geonames.org/export/dump geonames]

;--keep-complete=true
:  Use keep-complete=false to disable two additional program phases between
the split and the final distribution phase (not recommended). The first phase,
called gen-problem-list, detects all ways and relations that are crossing the
borders of one or more output files. The second phase, called
handle-problem-list, collects the coordinates of these ways and relations and
calculates all output files that are crossed or enclosed. The information is
passed to the final dist-phase in three temporary files. This avoids broken
polygons, but be aware that it requires to read the input files at least two
additional times.
<p>
Do not specify it with --overlap unless you have a good reason to do so.

;--mapid=63240001
:  Set the filename for the split files. In the example the first file will be
called 63240001.osm.pbf and the next one will be 63240002.osm.pbf and so on.

;--max-areas=512
:  The maximum number of areas that can be processed in a single pass during
the second stage of processing. This must be a number from 1 to 4096. Higher
numbers mean fewer passes over the source file and hence quicker overall
processing, but also require more memory. If you find you are running out of
memory but don't want to increase your --max-nodes value, try reducing this
instead. Changing this will have no effect on the result of the split, it's
purely to let you trade off memory for performance. Note that the first stage
of the processing has a fixed memory overhead regardless of what this is set
to so if you are running out of memory before the areas.list file is
generated, you need to either increase your -Xmx value or reduce the size of
the input file you're trying to split.

;--max-nodes=1600000
:  The maximum number of nodes that can be in any of the resultant files. The
default is fairly conservative, I think you could increase it quite a lot
before getting any 'map too big' messages.  I've not experimented much. Also
the bigger this value, the less memory is required during the splitting stage.

;--max-threads
:  The maximum number of threads used by splitter. Default is auto.

;--mixed
:  Specify this if the input osm file has nodes, ways and relations
intermingled or the ids are not strictly sorted. To increase performance, use
the osmosis sort function.

;--no-trim
:  Don't trim empty space off the edges of tiles. This option is ignored when
--polygon-file is used.

output=pbf
:  The format in which the output files are written. Possible values are xml,
pbf, o5m, and simulate. The default is pbf, which produces the smallest file
sizes. The o5m format is faster to write, but creates around 40% larger files.
The simulate option is for debugging purposes.

;--output-dir=.
:  The directory to which splitter should write the output files. If the
specified path to a directory doesn't exist, splitter tries to create it.
Defaults to the current working directory.

;--overlap=
:  Deprecated since r279. With keep-complete=false, splitter should include
nodes outside the bounding box, so that mkgmap can neatly crop exactly at the
border. This parameter controls the size of that overlap. It is in map units,
a default of 2000 is used which means about 0.04 degrees of latitude or
longitude. If --keep-complete=true is active and --overlap is given, a warning
will be printed because this combination rarely makes sense.

;--polygon-file
:  The name of a file containing a bounding polygon in the
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis/Polygon_Filter_File_Format osmosis polygon file format].
Splitter uses this fie when calculating the areas. It first calculates a grid
using the given --resolution. The input file is read and for each node, a
counter is increased for the related grid area. If the input file contains a
bounding box, this is applied to the grid so that nodes outside of the
bounding box are ignored. Next, if specified, the bounding polygon is used to
zero those grid elements outside of the bounding polygon area. If the polygon
area(s) describe(s) a rectilinear area with no more than 40 vertices, splitter
will try to create output files that fit exactly into the area, otherwise it
will approximate the polygon area with rectangles. 

;--precomp-sea
:  The name of a directory containing precompiled sea tiles. If given,
splitter will use the precompiled sea tiles in the same way as mkgmap does.
Use this if you want to use a polygon-file or --no-trim=true and mkgmap
creates empty *.img files combined with a message starting "There is not
enough room in a single garmin map for all the input data".

;--problem-file
:  The name of a file containing ways and relations that are known to cause
problems in the split process. Use this option if --keep-complete requires too
much time or memory and --overlap doesn't solve your problem. 
:  Syntax of problem file:
     way:<id> # comment...
     rel:<id> # comment...
example:
     way:2784765 # Ferry Guernsey - Jersey

;--problem-report
:  The name of a file to write the generated problem list created
with --keep-complete. The parameter is ignored if --keep-complete=false. You can
reuse this file with the --problem-file parameter, but do this only if you use
the same values for max-nodes and resolution. 

;--resolution=13
:  The resolution of the density map produced during the first phase. A value
between 1 and 24.  Default is 13. Increasing the value to 14 requires four
times more memory in the split phase. The value is ignored if a --split-file
is given. 

;--split-file=areas.list
:  Use the previously calculated tile areas instead of calculating them from
scratch. The file can also be in *.kml format.

;--status-freq
:  Displays the amount of memory used by the JVM every --status-freq seconds.
Set =0 to disable.  Default is 120.

;--stop-after
:  Debugging: stop after a given program phase. Can be split,
gen-problem-list, or handle-problem-list Default is dist which means execute
all phases.

;--write-kml
:  The name of a kml file to write out the areas to. This is in addition to
areas.list (which is always written out).

== Special options ==

;--version

:  If the parameter --version is found somewhere in the options, splitter will
just print the version info and exit. Version info looks like this:
 splitter 279 compiled 2013-01-12T01:45:02+0000

;--help
:  If the parameter --help is found somewhere in the options, splitter will
print a list of all known normal options together with a short help and exit.

== Tuning ==
=== Tuning for best performance ===

A few hints for those that are using splitter to split large files.

* For faster processing with --keep-complete=true, convert the input file to
o5m format using:
 osmconvert --drop-version file.osm -o=file.o5m

* The option --drop-version is optional, it reduces the file to that data
that is needed by splitter and mkgmap.

* If you still experience poor performance, look into splitter.log. Search
for the word Distributing.  You may find something like this in the next line:
 Processing 1502 areas in 3 passes, 501 areas at a time
<p>
This means splitter has to read the input file input three times because the
max-areas parameter was much smaller than the number of areas. If you have
enough heap, set max-areas value to a value that is higher than the number of
areas, e.g. --max-areas=2048. Execute splitter again and you should find
 Processing 1502 areas in a single pass

* More areas require more memory. Make sure that splitter has enough heap
(increase the -Xmx parameter) so that it doesn't waste much time in the
garbage collector (GC), but keep as much memory as possible for the systems
I/O caches.

* If available, use two different disks for input file and output directory,
esp. when you use o5m format for input and output.

* If you use mkgmap r2415 or later and disk space is no concern, consider to
use --output=o5m to speed up processing.

=== Tuning for low memory requirements ===

If your machine has less than 1GB free memory (eg. a netbook), you can still
use splitter, but you might have to be patient if you use the
parameter --keep-complete and want to split a file like germany.osm.pbf or a
larger one.  If needed, reduce the number of parrallel processed areas to 50
with the max-areas parameter. You have to use --keep-complete=false when
splitting an area like Europe. 

== Notes ==

* There is no longer an upper limit on the number of areas that can be output
(previously it was 255). More areas just mean potentially more passes being
required over the .osm file, and hence the splitter will take longer to run.

* There is no longer a limit on how many areas a way or relation can belong
to (previously it was 4).