I have a very simple setup running Gitea which I love. However, I enabled Elastic Search because it makes searching much faster than the default method.

I have a VPS running 16GB memory. The only things running on it are Nginx, PHP, Mysql, docker, and a few other things. Very rarely I ever hit over 6GB usage.

The issue comes when I enable Elastic Search. It seems to wipe me out at 15.7GB usage out of 16GB as soon as I start it up.

I searched online and found out about the /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options.d/jvm.options and adding

-XmxXG
-XmsXG

The question is, what should this amount be. I read that by default, Elastic uses 50%, however, when I started it up, it was wiping me out of memory and making the system almost have a stroke.

But setting it to 2GB seems to make it not as responsive on the Gitea website, sometimes even timing the website out.

So I’m not sure what “range” I should be using here. Or if I’m going to have to upgrade my VPS to 32GB in order to run this properly.