osm2pgsql Import | Server Specifications

The documentation contains some information on this, see https://nominatim.org/release-docs/late … /#hardware and https://osm2pgsql.org/doc/manual.html#s … quirements . For Europe you should have 64 GB RAM, maybe it will work with 32 GB RAM, something like 600 GB SSD (don't try with a spinning hard disk, it is far too slow), at least 4 CPUs, more is better. Those numbers are for each of Nominatim and osm2pgsql, not together! I don't now anything about those docker containers, so maybe they do that already, but make sure to tune your PostgreSQL setup (instructions on that is in the documentation, too). Tuning or not tuning your database setup can make the difference between this running in a few hours, or taking days.

I can't say for Nominatim, but the numbers above for osm2pgsql seem to be excessive. My server imports almost all of Europe, the import is finished in less than 2 hours.

It is a Hexacore with 64GB available, but during import the peak memory usage is below 48GB - including all other things running on the machine. The resulting database for mapnik rendering on the SSD is less than 40GB, so any SSD above 128GB should be fine.

I don't know what your docker containers are doing, of course. My database configuration is fine-tuned for performance and osm2pgsql is using a nodelist file to reduce memory consumption, if you use it without a nodelist and force it to cache all nodes in main memory, the consumption is much higher, then you might need > 64GB.

As for SSDs, in my experience two smaller SSDs mounted separately work better than one large SSD or RAID. Put the europe.pbf and the nodelist on one SSD and the database on another, then both SSDs can run with their full read and write performance during import.

Thank you that helped me a lot 🙂