> Those alone took ~9 hours to generate (x2 for separate 'retina display' tiles). I dread to think how long generating a whole world would take. Map tiles shou

> Those alone took ~9 hours to generate (x2 for separate 'retina display' tiles). I dread to think how long generating a whole world would take. Map tiles should almost be a canonical example of a ridiculously parallelizable problem. Even if the data access itself is your bottleneck, you can fix that by simply bringing up multiple servers and replicating it. Unless your map data is so dense that it takes over nine hours to generate a single tile, you can always scale the work out. It's only a matter of justifying the organizational time and whatever expenses are incurred for the extra equipment.