10.09.2025 | Frederik Ramm
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.
Here’s three concrete appeals to users of the download server:
1. If you want data for the whole planet, don’t download it piecemeal from us – simply get the planet file from planet.openstreetmap.org and you’re done!
2. If you want a large region (like Europe or North America) updated daily, use the excellent pyosmium-up-to-date program which will automatically determine the age of your local file and update it by downloading the latest changes; this saves something like 98% of network traffic compared to a fresh download, and is faster.
3. If you automate anything with regard to our download server, monitor what your script is doing or build in appropriate catches so that you don’t end up downloading the same file 1000 times just because your disk is full or something like that.
Happy downloading!
