Of course another question that was heard from every business, "how do we get the tiles". Mapnik had a sample python script packaged, but it was slow and hard to use. I'm pretty good at APIs, so I made my own.
Polytiles can render regular raster tiles for a given bbox in multiple threads. Obviously. It also can use a polygon file or a relation from OSM, it can render retina tiles, generate an mbtiles file, or just produce multiple lists for other tools.
Obviously setting up Mapnik locally is hard, and people wanted to download OSM tiles with a proper UI.
In 2011 I took over the development of JTileDownloader, which does exactly that. Bulk downloading was frowned upon even then. I tried to ease the load: imposed a 5 tiles/sec limit and altered downloading order to meta-tiles (8x8 tile packs).
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JTileDownloader
Still, @osm_tech don't care, JTD was banned by user-agent, and people returned to anonymous bulk downloaders with no safeguards.
Obviously setting up Mapnik locally is hard, and people wanted to download OSM tiles with a proper UI.
In 2011 I took over the development of JTileDownloader, which does exactly that. Bulk downloading was frowned upon even then. I tried to ease the load: imposed a 5 tiles/sec limit and altered downloading order to meta-tiles (8x8 tile packs).