How does Cairn stack up?

The landscape, in one paragraph each

Pelias

Geocoder originally built at Mapzen, now community-maintained. Multi-service Node.js stack on top of Elasticsearch. Strong on global coverage, breadth of importers (OSM, WhosOnFirst, OpenAddresses, Geonames, OpenStreetCam), and ranking quality. Production-ready but operationally heavy: a real Pelias deploy is roughly ten cooperating services plus an Elasticsearch cluster. MIT-licensed.

Photon

Single-JAR Java geocoder built on Elasticsearch by komoot. Smaller scope than Pelias — forward + autocomplete only, no structured queries, no reverse-on-OpenAddresses. Very fast on the autocomplete path because it's purpose-built for it. Apache-2.0. Still ships an Elasticsearch alongside the JAR.

Nominatim

Reference OpenStreetMap geocoder. PHP application backed by PostgreSQL + PostGIS. The canonical answer for OSM-only deployments and the engine behind nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Best-in-class reverse geocoding, careful address normalization, but forward search latency is bound by the database. GPL-2.0.

Cairn

Single static Rust binary plus a flat-file bundle. tantivy for text, custom rkyv tile blobs for places, R*-tree on bbox plus geo::Contains for reverse. No daemon dependencies, no cluster, no database. MIT or Apache-2.0. Alpha — not yet production-tested at planet scale; country-scale bundles work today.

Architecture matrix

Cairn measured latency

Numbers from cargo bench on an Apple M-series laptop in release mode. Synthetic in-memory datasets, single-thread, no network round-trip. They isolate the engine cost; real end-to-end latency adds HTTP framing on top (~50–200 µs).

Workload	Dataset	Time
Exact forward search	5,000 places	6.1 µs
Autocomplete (3-char prefix)	5,000 places	48.8 µs
Fuzzy search (1 typo)	5,000 places	54.8 µs
Point-in-polygon (PIP)	1,024 admin polygons	25 ns
Nearest-k (k = 10)	4,096 points	514 µs

End-to-end Switzerland benchmark

Same 506 MB Switzerland OSM PBF, same 6 408-query workload (Geonames-derived city + postcode + composite queries), same Apple Silicon host (36 GB RAM, OrbStack). Sequential single-client p50/p95/p99 from curl --time-total; peak RPS from ab -k keepalive sweep. Reproducible — see benchmarks/ in the repo for the harness.

Engine	Build	Disk	Hot RSS	p50	p95	p99	Peak RPS
Cairn	24 s	195 MB	80 MB	0.51 ms	0.63 ms	0.74 ms	57 554
Pelias	3 m 46 s	3.5 GB	2.7 GB	13.76 ms	34.41 ms	57.23 ms	362
Nominatim	3 h 13 m	9.2 GB	2.4 GB	9.51 ms	15.15 ms	23.00 ms	1 109
Photon	2 m 1 s	1.3 GB	2.1 GB	5.88 ms	15.26 ms	25.18 ms	2 406

Cairn ships the workload 31–77× faster at p99, sustains 24–159× higher peak RPS, with 26–34× smaller hot RSS and 6.7–48× smaller disk than the incumbents. Build wall-clock is 5–483× faster on the same 506 MB PBF input.

Country scale — Germany

Same harness, 8.6× the input (4.7 GB Geofabrik PBF, ~3 M places). Nominatim DE not run — projected ~28 h on arm64 single-thread osm2pgsql.

Engine	Build	Disk	Hot RSS	p50	p95	p99	Peak RPS
Cairn	8 m 7 s	1.54 GB	359 MB	0.57 ms	1.08 ms	2.35 ms	39 664
Pelias	37 m	5.28 GB	5.15 GB	10.29 ms	17.10 ms	23.16 ms	506
Photon	19 m 22 s	9.10 GB	2.13 GB	9.69 ms	43.91 ms	92.94 ms	1 919
Nominatim	not run — ~28 h projected on arm64 single-thread osm2pgsql

On 3 M places Cairn keeps a 10–40× p99 lead, 21–78× peak RPS, and 6–14× smaller hot RSS vs each incumbent. Build is 2.4–4.6× faster in wall-clock and produces a 3.4–5.9× smaller on-disk artifact.

Recall on noisy queries

1 153 deliberate typo / ASCII-fold variants, top-1 hit rate. Cairn's ?phonetic=true (DoubleMetaphone) single-handedly recovers nearly every typo. No incumbent ships a phonetic toggle today.

Variant	Hits	Recall
baseline	257 / 1 153	22.3 %
?fuzzy=1	865 / 1 153	75.0 %
?phonetic=true	1 147 / 1 153	99.5 %
?semantic=true	257 / 1 153	22.3 %
all flags on	1 153 / 1 153	100.0 %

Numbers shift on different disks / kernels / host load. Re-run with ./run.sh <engine> from the benchmarks/ directory to validate on your own hardware. The full report including per-engine setup gotchas is at benchmarks/results/REPORT.md.

When to pick what

Pick Pelias when

• You need the broadest set of importers and ranking knobs out of the box.
• Operating an Elasticsearch cluster is part of your platform anyway.
• You have a multi-service deploy story and a team to maintain it.

Pick Photon when

• Your hot path is autocomplete and you don't need structured queries.
• You want a JVM single-JAR deploy plus an ES, nothing more.
• You're okay re-importing a Nominatim DB to seed the index.

Pick Nominatim when

• Reverse geocoding correctness is the top priority.
• OSM-only is fine; no OpenAddresses or Geonames needs.
• GPL-2.0 is acceptable for your downstream.
• You already run PostgreSQL.

Pick Cairn when

• Airgap or edge deploy: you want to scp a tarball and a binary, not stand up a cluster.
• You want a single static binary you can ship inside a Docker image, a Lambda layer, or a customer's VPN.
• You're comfortable with alpha software at country scale and willing to file issues at planet scale.
• You want differential bundle updates without a replication daemon.
• You want MIT or Apache-2.0 in your dependency graph.

Honesty notes

• Cairn is alpha. Pelias, Photon, and Nominatim are battle-tested at scale. Don't pick Cairn because of a 6 µs benchmark; pick it because the deploy story matches what you can operate.
• The architecture matrix reflects each project's typical / documented deployment. You can run Pelias without all ten services, Nominatim without nginx, etc.; we describe the common shape.
• Cairn doesn't cover every importer Pelias supports yet — OpenStreetCam, transit feeds, custom CSVs need work. The four we ship (OSM / WoF / OpenAddresses / Geonames) cover the big coverage holes.
• Numbers will move. This page is updated when our benches change.

Security posture

Trivy scans the production container image on every push, every PR, and once a day at 06:17 UTC. The latest CRITICAL/HIGH/MEDIUM findings (mirrored from the GitHub Code Scanning tab):

Triage policy and reporting: SECURITY.md.