[Geocoding] Nominatim machine spec

[Simon Nuttall]

Hi Sarah,

For serving geocodes, we don't get very many requests, only a few
(less than ten) per second at most, and less than that in the main.

We do some of our own caching and detect postcodes and railway
stations ourselves.

We do like to use search-as-you-type which is a good reason why we
want to run our own service and so we don't use the public nominatim.

The main concern is how much hogging of the machine would be caused by
it constantly updating. When we were on a VM it could not cope, so
obviously that is a concern for us.

Simon

On 27 February 2015 at 16:08, Sarah Hoffmann <lonvia at denofr.de> wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> what are your requirements performance-wise? How many requests do you
> get at the moment?
>
> Sarah
>
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 03:41:16PM +0000, Simon Nuttall wrote:
>> 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 quite out of date as I stopped updating it when it couldn't keep up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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Geocoding mailing list
>> Geocoding at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/geocoding



-- 
Simon Nuttall

Route Master, CycleStreets.net