Better a bit late than never:
In case you haven’t noticed, we recently made the 6.3.0 release of openrouteservice on our GitHub repository. Though this didn’t bring much new to our public API, there is a pretty big “new” thing in it - the ability to produce country wide isochrones! Using some nifty optimisation techniques and some new fancy algorithms, it is now possible to precompute some information at graph build time which can then be used when requesting isochrones. This information drastically improves computation speed, and so where before a large isochrone (e.g. 5 hours driving range) would take 35 seconds to generate, this can now be calculated in only 3.5 seconds - a decrease in time of 90%!
You can see some more information on the GIScience blog about what the algorithm is and how it works.
Unfortunately though, at this time this functionality is only available if you run openrouteservice on your own machines as the extra time needed to calculate the optimisations at build time pushes us just over our limits. Hopefully though we will be able to introduce this into our global API when we have done some long waited graph building optimisations.
As always, a full list of chages for this release can be found in our changelog on GitHub.
Happy routing everyone!