[OSM-dev] Write PBF

[Igor Podolskiy]

Michael,

> I found in the OSM Wiki the following article.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/PBF_Format
>
> "It is also about 5x faster to write than a gzipped planet and 6x faster to read than a gzipped planet."
>
> Can anyone say how long do I need to write from database to pbf a country like Germany? Minutes, Hours, Weeks?
I don't have data for "from database to PBF" scenario. But I regularly 
apply (small) changes to my Germany PBF file, the script looks like this:

osmosis --read-replication-interval ./state --simplify-change \
     --read-pbf germany.osm.pbf \
     --apply-change \
     --log-progress \
     --write-pbf tmp.germany.osm.pbf omitmetadata=true

and today it said to me on an 64-Bit Ubuntu VM running on two cores of a 
Core i7-2600 3,4 GHz with vanilla LVM-virtualized SATA disks:

INFO: Total execution time: 462238 milliseconds.

Currently, the PBF file is about 900MB in size; these 460 seconds also 
include the download time for a day's worth of planet file changes, so 
the actual PBF reading/writing is even faster.

So it's definitely minutes for Germany, not weeks, given that you have 
reasonable hardware ;)

Hope that helps
Igor