[OSM-dev] Own OSM Database Hardware/Software

[Peter Körner]

Am 27.07.2010 18:25, schrieb bernhard zwischenbrugger:
> Hi all
>
> In October I will start a new course at my university.
> The topic is "business application development" and we will do
> serverside programming with ruby.
I's nice to see osm being used for "business applications" xD

> I'm the teacher of this course and now I have to plan it.
> My idea is to use the OSM database and let the students "play" with this
> data.
> We will do some data mining, design interfaces (rest, json), add new
> tables, benchmark tests, do projects, ...
Sounds quite cool! Maybe you could publish the resulting tools, some 
slides, handouts or whatever once you're ready.

> What kind of hardware do I need for that?
> Is a virtual host ok?
This highliy depends on two questions:
  - do you plan to serve the whole planet or only a part of it
  - how many users / how much traffic do you expect

> What's the minimum RAM, HD space?
using a berlin extract me and 3 other users worked with a VirtualBox 
with 256 MB RAM and 5 GB harddisk - but that was only one city.

For a complete planet you should have at least 8 GB of RAM and around 
500 GB of Harddisk.

> Which Linux should I install?
I'd suggest using Debian Stable or Testing.

Debian Testing has new Mapnik Packages but only Postgres 8.4 which is 
known to be slow with diff-updates.

Debian Stable has Postges 8.3 but you need to compile the packages 
yourself. I wrote two tutorials on this. They are in german but from 
your email address I gues this should not be the problem.
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:HowTo_minutely_hstore>
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:HowTo_Mapnik_%26_Tirex>

> How long does it take to load the data to the db?
> How long does it take to create an index on a table?
This is done in a single step:
For berlin my VM on a Laptop with slow HDs took 15 Minutes, on a fast 
server like ptolemy a planet took 2 1/2 days.

> I know, there are no exact answers for all this questions, but some
> hints would be nice.

> The first thing I have to do is to ask my boss for the hardware (or vhost).
> If that's ok, I'm able to continue planing.
I'm about to upload a torrent where you can get the whole VM already set 
up following those two tutorials. You can use it to start playing 
around. You can soon get the link from the wiki articles linked to above.

Peter