Well, trying out is better than a thousands words
Let's start it with index of whole Spain, 2.4gb download, 4gb on disk: https://gist.github.com/dkourilov/e243270684b5973f1fac005c78...
I'd say it's pretty usable to run a EU-sized country or several US states on any commodity PC. For embedded devices, it really depends what is the device. On Raspberry PI it should be fine for batch geocoding, realtime (typeahead) will definitely be lagging.
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.