Over the last few months I've been rendering out my own specialised tiles for a site I've been working on. I'm pre-rendering static tiles because I'm using a shared server and it's a lot quicker this way. The process looks a little like this:

1. Apply daily diff to osm file
2. Extract the area I'm interested in with osmosis
3. Import into PostgreSQL
4. Render with Mapnik using generate_tiles.py
5. Optimise with pngcrush and do some other things before diffing them and sending them to my live server.

This works fine, and there's really nothing wrong with the setup per se, except for the following two things:

1. It's slow.
2. I'm having quite a few street names get cut off at the edge of a tile and not carry over to the next one.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows of a better way of doing this.

It's my understanding that tilecache might work better, but I haven't found any indication that it will work how I want it to. So I'm wondering if anyone here has had any experience with rendering out static tiles, and what has worked out best. :)