How to change Elasticsearch max memory size

Question

I have an Apache server with a default configuration of Elasticsearch and everything works perfectly, except that the default configuration has a max size of 1GB.

I

Answer 1

Updated on Nov 24, 2016: Elasticsearch 5 apparently has changed the way to configure the JVM. See this answer here. The answer below still applies to versions < 5.

tirdadc, thank you for pointing this out in your comment below.

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I have a pastebin page that I share with others when wondering about memory and ES. It's worked OK for me: http://pastebin.com/mNUGQCLY. I'll paste the contents here as well:

References:

https://github.com/grigorescu/Brownian/wiki/ElasticSearch-Configuration http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/setup/installation/

Edit the following files to modify memory and file number limits. These instructions assume Ubuntu 10.04, may work on later versions and other distributions/OSes. (Edit: This works for Ubuntu 14.04 as well.)

/etc/security/limits.conf:

elasticsearch - nofile 65535
elasticsearch - memlock unlimited

/etc/default/elasticsearch (on CentOS/RH: /etc/sysconfig/elasticsearch ):

ES_HEAP_SIZE=512m
MAX_OPEN_FILES=65535
MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited

/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml:

bootstrap.mlockall: true