Faster imports with PostgreSQL 15

Osm2pgsql recently became a lot faster… And we didn’t have to do anything for it!

It has been a few months since PostgreSQL 15 was released, but we only recently got around to doing some benchmarks with it. Among many other changes it includes improvements to the way GIST indexes are built that make this process much faster. Building these indexes has always been one of the most time consuming parts of importing data with osm2pgsql, so these changes are very welcome. Build time for some indexes has dropped by more than half! That means that overall osm2pgsql import times can see about 20% improvements, for a full planet import that can be nearly two hours saved!

Note that you will only see that kind of improvements on non-slim imports, because in slim imports building the way nodes index is the bottleneck and that hasn’t become faster.

If you want to know more about those index changes, watch the talk GiST Index Building in PostgreSQL 15 that goes through all the details and also mentions what motivated those changes: It was the osm2pgsql imports the speaker has been doing regularly at their company. Thanks Aliaksandr Kalenik and Kontur for your work!

So if you haven’t updated yet, we recommend you do. (But be aware of some changes around schemas and permissions which might affect the way you interact with the database.)