[OSM-dev] The Rails Port: Populating the database

[Roland Olbricht]

Hello everybody,

while I'm still working on the boundary project, I have tried to set up
a local copy of the database according to
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/The_Rails_Port
The idea is to have a dynamic system as the boundary download file gets
larger and larger.

I ran into disk space issues while populating the database.

I have tried to populate the database with the non-us.osm.bz2 extract.
Its size is only about 1/3 of the planet.osm. But it still took more
than 38 GB of disk space before my disk definitely ran full. Also, it
took osmosis more than 36 hours before I killed the still unfinished task.

Is this normal? Even the uncompressed XML takes much less space. And I
can't imagine that everybody else is using more than 120 GB of disk
space for his local copy. As this is the first time I'm responsible for
administrating the database, I might have made even a stupid mistake. So
I would be grateful for any idea about this.

Cheers,

Roland