Tips & tricks using map tiles in memory card

@lice

I think it's time to exchange our experience in using MGMaps with stored map tiles.
As for the beginning I can suggest the following:

after saving app. 15000 tiles in my memory cards root directory, opening of the miniSD card for browsing its' gallery became significantly slower (app. 5 sec). After setting the tile folders' MGMapsCacheV1 attribute to 'hidden' (by means of PC) this problem disappears and card opens quickly as before.
MGmaps still "sees" tiles without any problems.

If you know something what would improve usage of this excellent application and is not described anywhere else in this forum- share it!

b8two · Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 6:25 am Post subject:

To Keep every avaliable space on your memory Card you can Format the memory Card to FAT32 in "Computer Management/Disk Management" for XP and specify the Cluster Size to 512Bytes (Instead of the Default (4Kb) 4186Bytes)

Be Sure to Backup your memory Card before you do the format or you will loose everything.

An Example of MGMapsCache space Saving with 44,500 Files;
87.9 MB (92,265,737 bytes) is Actual size
99.7 MB (104,608,768 bytes) with 512 byte Clusters
197 MB (207,306,752 bytes) with 4Kb Clusters (FAT32 Default)

CrazyTerabyte · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 6:21 pm Post subject:

I have Sony ERicsson K750i and a 2GB Memory Stick Pro Duo. AFAIK, 2GB is the maximum size accepted by this phone, but I might be wrong. I've just reformatted it to FAT32.

Without MGMaps cache, my card has 894 files, occupying 1710MB. When I insert the card, the phone stays frozen for about 30s reading the card.

With MGMaps cache, the number of files increased by 3430 (total = 4324 files) and the size increase by just 31MB.
When I inserted the card, the phone took about 1min30s to read it! So, I had to wait one minute and a half just to phone "unfreeze".

The same "wait" occurs when I turn on the phone with Memory Stick inside, which is very annoying.

I've tried to use MobyExplorer midlet to mark MGMapsCache folder as hidden, but it said the underlying filesystem did not support it. Well, I don't have Windows, so I can't try to mark that folder as hidden.

Does anyone have any idea about how to solve it?

Cristian Streng · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 6:44 pm Post subject:

mwice · nokia n95-8Gb / fw 15.0.015 / mgmaps 1.38.03

CrazyTerabyte · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 6:55 pm Post subject:

mwice · nokia n95-8Gb / fw 15.0.015 / mgmaps 1.38.03

Cristian Streng · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 7:33 pm Post subject:

CrazyTerabyte · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 7:46 pm Post subject:

mwice · nokia n95-8Gb / fw 15.0.015 / mgmaps 1.38.03

CrazyTerabyte · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:20 pm Post subject:

Now my MGMaps cache has 7378 files, 53.4M. The phone took about 2min15s frozen. Why on earth it must read ALL files? Why??? It's internal file manager can only read files from specific directory. Oh, these times an open-source firmware would be great.

Cristian, I think we now have a good reason to group files together. Smile

Maybe you could make MGMaps support both formats, so if grouped format is slower for someone, he can choose the separate format.

(but if my phone does not support seek correctly... well, I'm screwed. Smile

)

n95_rit · Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:30 pm Post subject:

HaVaNa7 · Junior Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Posts: 5 Phone Type: Unknown

@lice

lofarkas · Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 11:42 am Post subject:

Hmmm, I was wondering why my phone slowed down so much (After disconnecting from the PC I have a wait a more than a minute...)

It's the same issue as CrazyTerabyte's. SE D750i, 2 GB FAT32 memcard with about 50MB of maps...
Do let me know if you find a solution please.
Otherwise, the phone works fine and I never really switch it off so it's not a big deal.

n95_rit

CrazyTerabyte · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:18 am Post subject:

Cristian Streng · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 5:53 am Post subject:

lofarkas · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:47 pm Post subject:

Wow, that's pretty radical.
I'm inclined to think there was something else involved there...
Your phone has 3 times as much map data on it as mine, so that doesn't explain a 50-100 times greater reading time.
If I happen to upload more maps I'll report back.

@lice · Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 9:30 am Post subject:

Another one tip:
for those users who sits behind proxy servers like I do and to download first 10000 tiles I was forced to use dial-up internet connection Embarassed

- took ages... Then I got tired of this and decided to do some googling to find the way how to bypass proxy.
So, wget (which downloads tiles) has built-in possibility to work through http proxy servers, all what you need is- set this proxy server adress in Windows environment variables. For this reason I wrote a short batch file with 2 commands- 1)set proxy address and 2)launch excellent tool MaptileFE script. For my particular case .bat file looks like this (I have Win98):
set http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:5865
f:\perl\bin\perl MapTileFE.pl
Done! Now my tile collecting speed is much better Smile

I believe that many of you who are familiar with wget program already knew about this option but for me as I just started to use it it was nice discovery.