ABSTRACT. We investigate the compactness of composition operators on the Hardy space of Dirichlet series induced by a map ϕ(s) = c 0 s + ϕ 0 (s), where ϕ 0 is a Dirichlet polynomial. Our results depend heavily on the characteristic c 0 of ϕ and, when c 0 = 0, on both the degree of ϕ 0 and its local behaviour near a boundary point. We also study the approximation numbers for some of these operators. Our methods involve geometric estimates of Carleson measures and tools from differential geometry.