packet_mover

Thanks both - appreciate the clarification and the Spain datapoint.

Those numbers look pretty reasonable. I’ll keep Photon in mind and, as I get time to benchmark different approaches on a few representative regions/hardware, I’ll use the results to decide what the best way forward is - and I’ll publish the numbers when I do.

Thanks, appreciate the context.

Bounding box input is a really interesting idea. For my product, the best use would probably be to automate the request/fulfillment flow if this ever picks up. Letting someone draw/paste a bbox makes the request unambiguous and could be automated end-to-end.

Btw, the pack build process isn’t that compute-heavy. It’s not instant, but as a rough data point: on my laptop, a small country like Austria/Slovakia is on the order of ~1 hour to build the three artifacts (tiles + routing tiles + SQLite geocoder).

Yeah, I also ran into that when ranking geocoding results - you want to show more "important"/notable places first. In your case, one pragmatic approach could be to keep only features with wikidata or wikipedia tags (and maybe a small whitelist like natural=peak, tourism=viewpoint/attraction).

This is also why I lean on Nominatim-derived data for Corviont - it already condenses a lot of this into a single importance/ranking model. I have not tried a whole-world build though, so I am not sure how well that behaves at planet scale.

Thank you, that's very helpful.

No. When I looked at Photon and saw that it involves running Java plus an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch backend on the device, I assumed it would be heavier in terms of memory and moving parts than my setup (single SQLite file + small HTTP API).

Have you (or anyone here) actually run Photon on edge-class hardware? If you have real-world numbers, I'd be interested in seeing them. When I add house-number search, Photon might be an easier route than enhancing my current approach.

I do not have published benchmarks yet (I want to collect a few real region packs first and then write this up properly).

One goal of Corviont is to avoid the on-device pain you hit with OSRM/Nominatim: the region pack is built once elsewhere, and the edge box mostly just serves prebuilt artifacts (PMTiles tiles, Valhalla routing tiles, and a SQLite geocoder index based on Nominatim).

In practice, requirements scale with region size and traffic. For larger regions the main constraint is usually SSD storage plus enough RAM headroom for routing/cache. I also picked Valhalla partly because it generally has a smaller RAM footprint than OSRM at serving time (OSRM is extremely fast but tends to be more memory-hungry).

Yeah, house-number lookup is not there yet. The demo geocoder does place/street-level search + reverse, but house numbers need a richer address index - it's on the roadmap.

Re: a bbox "builder" repo - it's an interesting idea. I could see it going two ways: (a) you want to run a bbox builder yourself, or (b) you want a simple way to specify a bbox so the dataset pack can be produced for you.

I started with the "ship a known-good pack" approach because the build pipeline is the messy part, and I want deployed boxes to stay simple/reproducible.

For your use case, which did you mean - run the build locally, or "draw/paste a bbox and get back a ready-to-run pack"? And would bbox be OK, or do you prefer admin boundaries (country/state/city)?

Thanks for chiming in - super helpful context.

I am trying to learn from real deployments as I design Corviont's updater for edge boxes (bandwidth caps, maintenance windows, unreliable WAN, atomic swap + rollback).

When you say transit "zones" are small enough to deploy incrementally - what is the actual artifact per zone (roughly what format), and what sizes do you typically see?

And when a transit zone dataset changes, how do you roll that out safely - do you restart/reload the backend that serves that zone, or do you bring up a new backend/version and then flip travelmux to point at it?

Photon is solid - but it comes with a very different operational profile than what I am aiming for.

Photon is built on Elasticsearch (Java) - so it tends to mean a heavier index + higher RAM/CPU expectations and more moving parts. That's fine on a beefy server, but it is a rough fit for the "drop-in appliance on small edge/on-prem boxes (amd64/arm64) + simple ops" goal.

Corviont's geocoder is intentionally "boring": a single SQLite file + an HTTP service, built from Nominatim-derived data. Fast startup, low RAM, easy to ship per-region, and it stays consistent with the rest of the stack.

That said - if there is demand for a "server-grade geocoder option" for people already comfortable running Elastic, I am not opposed to offering it as an alternative profile. The default is just optimized for constrained edge hardware and minimal moving parts.

Thank you! And yes, Corviont is intentionally a stack of separable services behind one gateway - so "geocoder-only" is exactly the kind of config I want to support (skip PMTiles + Valhalla and ship only the SQLite index + reverse API).

Re: Weathergraph - thanks for the details. Since you already run whole-world reverse geocoding on a single server, that's a bit different from Corviont's current regional/fleet packaging (where you ship only the area you need to each edge/on-prem deployment). A "world geocoder-only" pack could still make sense - but it's a different distribution/update story than my default.

For your use case, do you want reverse results at the city/region/country level - or do you also need street/house number detail? That choice mostly determines how heavy a world geocoder-only pack needs to be.