A Lighter Elasticsearch Instance

Elasticsearch when downloaded can consume by default nearly half of the RAM on your local machine. 🥶🥶

If you prefer to run a local instance of elasticsearch (without Docker), here are the steps to lower its memory consumption on a Debian-based distro (i.e. Mint or Ubuntu).

This tutorial was tested on a WSL Ubuntu 20.04.

Check if You have OpenJDK 11 Installed

First, make sure you have OpenJDK 11, which usually comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. To check, run in terminal:

java -version        

if you don't have it installed you can follow this simple tutorial for debian-based distros: 

Ok, so after confirming we have OpenJDK installed we can start with Elasticsearch download and configuration.

Download and install Elasticsearch

curl -fsSL https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add 

echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install elasticsearch        

Configuration of Elasticsearch

To access the elasticsearch yml file:

sudo nano /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml        

 Uncomment 'network.host' and change it to 'localhost' for local machine: 

network.host: localhost        

Check if Elasticsearch starts:

sudo systemctl start elasticsearch        

or use 'service' if you don't have 'systemctl' which is common on WSL distros.

sudo service elasticsearch start        

Great, if it starts without a problem we can now shut it down to configure memory requirements:

sudo systemctl stop elasticsearch        

 or 

sudo service elasticsearch stop        

Let's create a new file called 'memory.options' in the 'jvm.options.d' directory so we can define memory requirements when an Elasticsearch instance starts:

BTW, I chose to name the file 'memory' but you can choose whatever name you want as long as the file extension is `.options` :

 sudo nano /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options.d/memory.options        

 In the file, add the minimum and maximum memory requirements (I decided on 1G 🙅♂️):

  -Xms1g

  -Xmx1g        

Great, we are done! Now restart Elasticsearch and your RAM should be much lower!

Resources For Further Hacking

Install Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch Heap Size

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