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Operations/Minutes/2026-09-03

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OpenStreetMap Foundation, Operations Meeting - Draft minutes

These minutes do not go through a formal acceptance process.
This is not strictly an Operations Working Group (OWG) meeting.

Thursday 3 September 2026, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Reportage

GPS points database table

Action item 2026-08-06 Rubén to conduct a storage comparison experiment using traces of various sizes, load them into a database in the current schema and as line strings, and compare table sizes. [Topic: GPS points database table]

Done.

DWG request for user info for moderators

Action item 2026-05-28 Minh to follow up on DWG non-disclosure agreements, then IP access for moderators in website repo. [DWG request for user info for moderators]

Did not hear back.

Fastly

Action item 2026-05-14 Grant to check with Fastly team via Slack about 100% ngwaf traffic.

They said it's fine and implied they would prefer it on. Done.

QGIS Tiles usage

Action item 2026-03-19 Grant to research what triggers a large download from QGIS. [Topic: QGIS Tiles usage] # 2026-05-14 Not much progress; unable to find the new usage header in latest versions. # 2026-06-11 Action item to be parked.

There's a major point release with the features in, so there is probably reasonable adoption now.

Deployment of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) server

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1399

Options for physical machine

  • Stormfly 4.0. Sarah Hoffmann (Nominatim maintainer) does not need it any more, but we might prefer to have a machine in the EU.
  • Smaug (Matomo server). 40 cores, 384 gigabytes of RAM. Potential issue: working around the web server. It will be in a Docker container, so we could reverse proxy through the Apache instance into it.

GlitchTip [1]

  • Comes with 3 containers: main, PostgreSQL and Valkey.
  • Suggestion to run 1) main container with Podman, 2) PostgreSQL and Valkey on the host instead.
  • It uses Sentry gem.
  • Website: OpenTelemetry will need to be replaced with the Sentry client.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Self hosted Sentry[1], written in Django, has an 800-line Docker compose that runs a shell script sourcing around 20 additional shell scripts. Around 57 containers.
  • Prometheus: is not designed for capturing stack traces for exceptions, though it may still be useful for performance metrics.

[1] GlitchTip is "an open-source reimplementation of Sentry's proprietary backend. It uses a very small amount of Sentry ported code from when Sentry was BSD. A reimplementation was chosen over a fork in order to value simplicity over scale."

Prometheus cleanup

Grant did two rounds of Prometheus cleanup, removing old series data. Saved around 200 GB, 25% of the Prometheus database size, reducing disk usage from 90% to 70% full. Queries appear to run faster since the cleanup, based on limited testing. A third cleanup round is planned

MediaWiki upgrade issues

The MediaWiki upgrade has generated multiple new tickets. The root cause is not always known.

We are currently testing 3 extensions on the wiki:

InstaCommons

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons

Suggestions:

  • remove the manual InstantCommons override added a few months ago, as it is now redundant. Consistent with new InstaCommons behaviour. Removal not urgent.
  • create a ticket for future removal, before it creates problems.

Translate extension

The Translate extension offers formal support for translations on the OSM wiki. The community had a wiki vote on it some years ago. Once enabled, it will be not rolled out for tag description pages, but for other documentation pages. A special user role is required - it has already been set up on the test wiki.

Issue: searching for translations seems to be breaking the translation memory feature. We could launch and then investigate.

Authentication

Suggestion: Work on the authentication feature first, over the translate extension, as authentication is reversible if we break it.

Authentication is not live on the test wiki yet.

Ticket: DynamicPageListEngine

Two tickets:

We are seeing an exception and a fix has been merged. We probably need to confirm that it has been fixed in the test wiki, before merging in production.

Action item: Minh to test on the test wiki the fix for the exception related to DynamicPageListEngine.

Review of OSM wiki tickets

List at https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues?q=state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22service%3Awiki%22

Ticket: Wiki reply CAPTCHA is empty

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1397 Wiki reply CAPTCHA is empty (no image/question) and blocks all submissions — load.php startup module throwing fatal RuntimeExceptionservice.

  • It's a significant impacting bug, that would need to be fixed.
  • There's a workaround - we just have to keep pointing people to that.

Action item: Minh to check with MediaWiki people the process for getting things backported. Context: need to backport the fix for https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1397

Ticket: Support Australian English (en-au) translations on the wiki

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1003

Suggestions

  • Minh to ask MediaWiki to add Australian English as a supported language.
  • Check whether there is a local configuration option that we could enable, without an upstream change.

Action item: Minh to find more information about supporting Australian English (en-au) translations on the wiki https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1003

MediaWiki upgrade issues - Foundation wiki

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1258

Not an issue on the OSM wiki. Does not seem like a coding issue.

Hypothesis: the database is in some weird encoding and the MediaWiki is screwing it up.

Action item: Grant to look into the Foundation wiki issue https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1258

CiviCRM test instance

OSMF found a contractor in the OSM community for CiviCRM. They will notify Grant about requirements for the test instance, run on AWS. Some test data is needed and Grant prefers to not include any real data.

Spyglass

Grant to finish the Spyglass implementation.

Action items

  • 2026-08-20 Rubén to open a pull request for the LineString changes. [Topic: GPX trace conversion to LineStrings]~~ https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/7348
  • 2026-08-06 Tom to update the notes on how to perform Postgres version upgrades. For major Postgres versions we have to run stanza-upgrade on the repository before we start up the new version of Postgres. Does not apply for point releases. [Topic: pgbackrest upgrades]
  • 2026-08-06 OPS to do a test on one of the slave servers and as part of that test a pgbackrest restore. [Topic: pgbackrest upgrades]
  • 2026-08-06 OPS to decide whether to enable page checksums. This will be decoupled from the pgbackrest upgrade, as it requires significant downtime. [Topic: pgbackrest upgrades]
  • 2026-08-06 Rubén to conduct a storage comparison experiment using traces of various sizes, load them into a database in the current schema and as line strings, and compare table sizes. [Topic: GPS points database table]
  • 2026-07-23 Grant and Minh to discuss the MediaWiki OAuth extension work. [Topic: cgimap maintenance]
  • 2026-05-28 Minh to follow up on DWG non-disclosure agreements, then IP access for moderators in website repo. [DWG request for user info for moderators]
  • 2026-05-28 Paul to ask OSM France how do they view if we retire the HOT style from osm.org since it is not under active development** [AOB: Tracestrack topo and HOT layers]
  • 2026-05-14 Grant to check with Fastly team via Slack about 100% ngwaf traffic
  • 2026-03-19 Grant to research what triggers a large download from QGIS. [Topic: QGIS Tiles usage] # 2026-05-14 Not much progress; unable to find the new usage header in latest versions. # 2026-06-11 Action item to be parked.
  • 2026-03-19 Paul and Grant to run some time limited experiments during non peak hours to test catching anonymous/fake-ua scrapers. Genuine Google Bot etc will continue to be permitted. [Topic: Fastly Client Challenges]
  • 2025-10-16 Grant and Paul to set up a meeting about AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rolesanywhere/latest/userguide/introduction.html. [Topic: AWS CA cert] # 2026-05-14 Grant to chat to Tom about what CA + Signed Certs are required. Grant to read the AWS documentation on requirements.
  • 2025-10-16 Grant to create a PR regarding refactoring some stuff. Make kitchen handle selecting cookbook-OS combos. and only running tests on cookbooks that have changed [Topic: Reworking of Test Kitchen methods for defining which jobs run on Test Kitchen Github actions]
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