Best Way to Scale Nominatim

[tzezar]

Hello everyone,

What’s the recommended way to scale Nominatim using Docker Compose?

I’d really prefer not to spin up multiple full database containers. Instead, I’m considering running multiple nominatim-api containers against a single database instance to improve performance. Does that approach make sense?

If anyone has suggestions or guidance on setting this up properly, I’d really appreciate the help. Thanks!

[leonardehrenfried]

That's not the goal of this image. Check out: https://github.com/smithmicro/n7m

[markdavieswlt]

Out of interest, What problem are you trying to solve ?

Im pretty sure the database will be the bottleneck, not the API.
Vertical scaling of your server using bare metal, Nvme drives etc will see a much better throughput.

[tzezar]

You know, my main challenge is achieving high performance while keeping infrastructure costs relatively low. I’ve been assigned a task that involves live reverse geocoding of GPS coordinates for approximately 800 devices per second. I was advised to use Nominatim, so I started setting it up.

After importing Europe and running a few load tests, I couldn’t get beyond ~370 requests per second. PostgreSQL CPU usage hovers around 5%, and I/O doesn’t seem to be a bottleneck either, so I suspect the issue lies in the performance of the HTTP server exposing the API.

The server is running Ubuntu 24.04, equipped with 16 cores and 128 GB of RAM.