Speed buff of 200%

Recently, I have once again thought up ideas how I can further improve the render speed, so that I can produce more tiles in less time. As you can imagine, when dealing with this amount of OpenStreetMap data plus many images in memory at the same time, the RAM consumption is quite considerable. I would consider my main machine to be high end, and it is equipped with relatively fast 64 GB RAM. An amount most certainly needed for this kind of task.

After some twisting and turning some of the nuts and bolts, I successfully implemented a speed boost of 200% - in other words, rendering of imagery is now twice as fast. This also means I am able to produce more complete 1x1 degree tiles in less time - namely, twice as much in the same time.

In numbers, this means a full tile now renders at about three hours. If at some point I can afford to leave the machine running for 24 hours, it could produce roughly 8 full tiles on a single day. That is quite a leap forward, considering the amount of data being processed.

But don't be alarmed - the renders have not lost a single bit of quality with this new speed buff applied.