[OSM-talk] Issues with OSM import to postgis

[Zolt Egete]

Hello

I have issues with importing large (planet) OSM files my postGIS 
database using the osm2pgsql tool.
The smaller files like some of the continents I could easily import but 
with large files I have problems.

The hardware configuration is the following
RAM: 3GB
HDD: 2TB
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz

Software:
CentOS 5.6 32 bit
Postgres 8.4
PostGIS 1.5.2
Geoserver 2.1.0
Java 1.6 update 25
osm2pgsql - latest from the SVN

For the import I use the following command
./osm2pgsql -U postgres -s -u -S default.style -d gisa -C 2500 
/home/zsolt/tmp/planet-100127.osm
The -C parameter I have altered several time and I have tried to lower 
the values for it but I have had no success
The error I get with this particular file is the following

Reading in file: /home/zsolt/tmp/planet-100127.osm
Processing: Node(225520k) Way(0k) Relation(0)Entity: line 316029280: 
parser error : Specification mandate value for attribute version5
253" lat="33.5848027" lon="35.4919974" timestamp="2008-04-22T17:21:36Z" 
version5
                                                                                ^
Entity: line 316029280: parser error : attributes construct error
253" lat="33.5848027" lon="35.4919974" timestamp="2008-04-22T17:21:36Z" 
version5
                                                                                ^
Entity: line 316029280: parser error : Couldn't find end of Start Tag node
253" lat="33.5848027" lon="35.4919974" timestamp="2008-04-22T17:21:36Z" 
version5
                                                                                ^
/home/zsolt/tmp/planet-100127.osm : failed to parse
Error occurred, cleaning up

Since I have seen on several places that messages about faulty XML can 
be cause the memory I have expanded the swap space
I have added a swap file to my system to extend the swap space so now I 
have 14GB of swap space but I still get the same error.

What am I doing wrong ?
Are there any alternatives to osm2pgsql maybe something that ?
Is my HW configuration to low ?
Should I go with a 64 bit system ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.