Request format and response codes
GET /tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf
Accept: application/vnd.mapbox-vector-tile
z is the zoom level (0–16), x and y the tile
column and row. Values outside the valid range for a zoom level are rejected before
disk lookup.
| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 200 | Tile body follows, gzip-encoded. |
| 204 | Tile is empty at this zoom — not an error. |
| 304 | If-None-Match matched the current ETag. |
| 400 | Coordinates outside the valid range for the zoom level. |
| 404 | Path does not match the tile scheme. |
Keep connections alive. A map view typically pulls twenty to forty tiles at once, and HTTP/2 multiplexing over a single connection is markedly faster than opening a socket per tile. Clients that disable multiplexing should cap concurrency at six.
Do not retry a 204. Empty tiles are common over water and sparse terrain;
treating them as failures produces retry storms that show up as latency for everyone else.
The extract is re-imported weekly. During a rebuild the previous tile set stays in place and is swapped atomically when the new set is complete, so requests are never served from a half-written directory.