[OSM-dev] HTTPS on Nominatim

[Grant Slater]

On 13 November 2013 17:56, François Lacombe
<francois.lacombe at telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:
>
> I was wondering if it's possible to send HTTPS requests to Nominatim service?
> https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search doesn't answer.
>

Currently HTTPS is not offered for nominatim.openstreetmap.org
Nominatim serves over 100 requests per second and we do not yet have
the hardware resources to offer HTTPS.

Technical:
While easy enough to enable, the server is already heavily CPU loaded.
The server uses Xeon 56xx CPUs with the AES instruction set but the
SSL connection setup / key-exchange is still expensive. The nature of
requests on nominatim is that most requests will start a new
connection setup. We are planning to get another server for nominatim
in the next few months. (redundancy / easier maintenance / spread
load)

Regards
 Grant
 Part of OSM sysadmin team.