Comment by runako
5 days ago
In case others are looking at Nominatim, this is from the Nominatim docs:
"For a full planet import 128GB of RAM or more are strongly recommended. Do not report out of memory problems if you have less than 64GB RAM."
That's ~$150/mo at Hetzner on bare metal, $672/mo at Digital Ocean, starting at $487/mo at AWS. For a non-redundant, low-availability configuration.
I guess this is for type-ahead speed type queries? I found the page: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Installation...
But it doesn't mention why you need this amount of RAM or how you could opt out of that requirement? i.e., if the queries run directly against the DB w/o indexes, etc. why the high RAM requirement?
AFAIK, a lot of the RAM requirements come from importing and processing the data. It already takes quite a long time and would be even slower without heavily utilizing RAM.
Nominatim also doesn't support any sort of typeahead queries. There's Photon(https://github.com/komoot/photon), which works in concert with Nominatim and is similarly tied to OSM as a data source.
There's also Pelias(https://pelias.io/), an open-source geocoder that handles all types of geocoding in one and supports OSM, OpenAddresses and many other sources (including custom data) out of the box. Admittedly it can have more moving parts as a result, but it can be set up with relatively little RAM if you're careful (I bet a planet install could be done somewhat slowly with 32GB RAM). Full disclosure, I have been a core-maintiner of the project since 2015.