I've noticed this week that changes don't seem to be appearing in the osmarender layer. Looking at the server status pages it looks like there is a large backlog (30,000 requests). There are also some changes I made a few weeks ago which still aren't rendered at all at lower resolutions. Is it the case that we have reached the point where there are simply more people editing openstreetmap.org, but without a corresponding increase in the number of people willing to render tiles? If so, what can be done about it? Do we just need more people to volunteer their CPU time to keep up?

I noticed that Deelkar expressed some concerns about osmarender a few weeks ago, especially concerning the hardware requirements for rendering the more complicated tiles - these can take up to 12GB of RAM to render, which is more than most people have available. It seems that the osmarender infrastructure is creaking at the seams, I'm not one of the developers but wonder what (if anything) I can do to help. I find osmarender really useful as a preliminary check of my edits, it usually flags up a few issues that require tweaking before Mapnik renders those changes on a Wednesday.