In the past blog post I wrote about the newest changes and encoding techniques that have been implemented in the Open Source Routing Project (OSRM). So I think it is time do a little comparison analysis about the request/response time of several routing APIs. The main question I wanted to answer was: “Is an OpenStreetMap direction service faster than G**gle?” I tested the following direction APIs for cars (fastest): MapQuest, CloudMade, G**gle and finally OSRM. For the analyses I wrote a small Java tool, which measured the time to get a result of a routing-service. I did all tests at home with a “regular” 12kbit/s internet connection. I tested several distance levels and the results can be seen in the following table. It shows the average times of five requests for each route with a delay of 3 seconds between each request/response. Overall I did this analysis three times.

The results are quite impressive. OSRM calculates the fastest route for all five test routes! Unfortunately we do not have any information about the server infrastructure at G**gle, MapQuest or CloudMade but the OSRM engine is running on a virtual server with limited hardware resources. It seems that the CloudMade directions service does not like Paris very much, as can be seen in the following image 😉

I will try to do a second comparison with Bing Maps, YOURS and Routino. So stay tuned …

— Update —

>> The second blog post is here: Comparison of (OSM) routing-engines – Reloaded <<

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂