[Geocoding] Nominatim machine spec

[Simon Nuttall]

We're trying to spec up a new machine to run CycleStreets and we would
like to instantiate a worldwide Nominatim service too.

Our current Nominatim service (which runs in a VM) is now getting
quite out of date as I stopped updating it when it couldn't keep up
with the updates and was hogging the disk.

Our new machine will not be a VM, and I think it will be able to run
alongside CycleStreets in the same bare metal Ubuntu installation,
their main common element will be apache2.

My question relates to how much RAM is used by a world-wide Nominatim
when it has finished it's initial set up. Does it need to have a big
permanently allocated RAM image to operate efficiently? If so how big
is that RAM image?

Will the updating be a significant drain on the performance of the
machine overall?

Is there a big RAM requirement during the initialization phase?

Although we're considering getting a machine with 128GB RAM for
CycleStreets an alternative option is to get a separate dedicated
smaller machine that only has 16GB. Could that do the whole world
(presumably taking much longer for the initialization phase), but fine
once it has got through that?

Simon

-- 
Simon Nuttall

Route Master, CycleStreets.net