Increase virtual memory
Self-managed deployments are Elastic Stack deployments managed without the assistance of an orchestrator. Availability This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage. This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.
Self-managed
Generally available
Elasticsearch uses a mmapfs directory by default to store its indices, which relies on memory-mapped files. As a result, the default operating system limit for the maximum number of memory mappings per process (vm.max_map_count) must be adequately high. If this limit is too low, the node might fail to start or encounter out-of-memory errors.
If the operating system's default vm.max_map_count value is 1048576 or higher, no configuration change is necessary. If the default value is lower than 1048576, configure the vm.max_map_count parameter to 1048576.
On Linux, you can increase the limits of the vm.max_map_count parameter by following this step as an account with root privileges:
sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576
To set this value permanently, update the vm.max_map_count setting in /etc/sysctl.conf.
To verify after rebooting, run:
sysctl vm.max_map_count
To reflect the change immediately, without rebooting, run:
sudo sysctl --system
While RPM and Debian packages attempt to configure this automatically, setting the value in /etc/sysctl.conf ensures that it takes precedence and that the correct value is applied, overriding any package-level defaults.
You can find out the current mmap count of a running Elasticsearch process using the following command, where $PID is the process ID of the running Elasticsearch process:
wc -l /proc/$PID/maps