I’ve recently started importing the planet.osm file into a postgresql database using the osm2pgsql utility. When I started I couldn’t find any up-to-date statistics on the number of primitives in the database to estimate the time it would take so I’ve posted them here. I’m running on a machine with only 2GB RAM allocated under VMWare and a slow 7200RPM 1TB drive and it looks like the process will take around 5 days to complete. The final stages of creating indexes on the tables seems to be taking as long as the initial import.
Reading in file: /home/mapnik/osm/planet-090916.osm.bz2
Processing: Node(434807k) Way(33142k) Relation(212k)
Node stats: total(434807934), max(497541099)
Way stats: total(33142281), max(40900619)
Relation stats: total(212012), max(253016)