Jaeyeol Lee: I've been thinking about adding full search support for OpenStreetMap. According to the Nominatim documentation, it says A minimum of 2GB of RAM is required or installation will fail. 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.For a full planet install you will need at least 1TB of hard disk space. Take into account that the OSM database is growing fast. Fast disks are essential. Using NVME disks is recommended.Even on a well configured machine the import of a full planet takes around 2.5 days. When using traditional SSDs, 4-5 days are more realistic. https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Installation/#prerequisites Honestly, that kind of scale just makes me want to try it

Syntax	Description	Examples
`"` keyword `"`	Finds the string within quotes, including spaces. Case-insensitive. (Escape quotes inside with `\"`)	`"Hackers' Pub"`
`from:` handle	Finds content written by the specified user.	`from:hongminhee` `from:hongminhee@hollo.social`
`lang:` ISO 639-1	Finds content written in the specified language.	`lang:en`
`#` tag	Finds content with the specified tag. Case-insensitive.	`#HackersPub`
condition condition	Finds content that satisfies both conditions on either side of the space (logical AND).	`"Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
condition `OR` condition	Finds content that satisfies at least one of the conditions on either side of the OR operator (logical OR).	`#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
`(` condition `)`	Combines the operators within the parentheses first.	`(#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" OR "Hackers Pub") lang:en`

Jaeyeol Lee @kodingwarrior@hackers.pub

3/12/2026, 3:37:35 PM

Public

I've been thinking about adding full search support for OpenStreetMap. According to the Nominatim documentation, it says

A minimum of 2GB of RAM is required or installation will fail. 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. For a full planet install you will need at least 1TB of hard disk space. Take into account that the OSM database is growing fast. Fast disks are essential. Using NVME disks is recommended. Even on a well configured machine the import of a full planet takes around 2.5 days. When using traditional SSDs, 4-5 days are more realistic.

https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Installation/#prerequisites

Honestly, that kind of scale just makes me want to try it

Basic Installation - Nominatim 5.2.0 Manual

nominatim.org

If you have a fediverse account, you can reply to this note from your own instance. Search https://hackers.pub/ap/notes/019ce2b2-3291-7658-bcc1-73881e3d9256 on your instance and reply to it.

Ian Wagner @ianthetechie@fosstodon.org

3/12/2026, 3:45:17 PM

Public

@kodingwarriorJaeyeol Lee Pelias is slightly more resource light. I think Proton may be as well but haven’t looked at that one in a while.

Nominatim doesn’t do very good fuzzy search / autocomplete by the way. Pelias is much better at this but it’s also very complicated to host. (My company, Stadia Maps, started with Pelias but have evolved and reduced the number of microservices with our own. The architecture is sound though.)