Unsolicited opinion: If #Mastodon wants to be a part of the #Fediverse that encourages small #selfhosted instances to be part of the whole, then it has to be a lean system able to be installed on second-hand/hand-me-down hardware and it should run reas...
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Sean Boyer 🇵🇸 FREE PALESTINEreplied to Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 on last edited by
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Philipp Krennreplied to Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 last edited by
@chris
1. not sure you're seen it already, but if you have docker you can just run "curl -fsSL https://elastic.co/start-local | sh" to get going (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/run-elasticsearch-locally.html#local-dev-quick-start)
2. while elasticsearch won't be tiny, the most common problem is that people don't configure the heap size and then elasticsearch assumes that it should own the entire machine. will depend on your activity and the initial data import but 1GB should get you going.
I'd also say that some of the java dislike is a bit dated at this point -
@jerome @EdwinG @chris I'm clearly biased here but we'd say that it's rather the opposite: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-opensearch-performance-gap
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Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸replied to Philipp Krenn last edited by
@xeraa thanks! I’m running a strait install on Debian. Can you point to some configuration options for the Heap size?
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Philipp Krennreplied to Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 last edited by
@chris yes: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/advanced-configuration.html
1. create a file in /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options.d/ with the custom config (this will survive upgrades; don't change the jvm.options file directly)
2. try something like 700m as a starting point. you might be able to go a bit lower. or with more activity you might need to go higher. there are details on the setting page for Xmx + Xms — this is what you want
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Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸replied to Philipp Krenn last edited by
@xeraa @jerome @EdwinG this is really wonderful that you're here Philipp. Your advice is really interesting and opposite to what I've seen elsewhere. My old iMac (2008) has 16GB of RAM, I had been told previously to look at allocating 25-50% of the RAM to Java which translates to a mammoth 8GB. I'm going to try cutting it right down to 1GB and see what happens.
What are some metrics or tools I can use to determine if the RAM it is using is suitable? -
Philipp Krennreplied to Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 last edited by
@chris @jerome @EdwinG so there is on and off heap (mostly caching) memory needed; normally you'd split it into equal parts. our smallest cloud instance has 1GB of memory and 500MB of heap
your use-case might need more (depending on how hard you push it). but just to get started you should be able to go with 1GB total or maybe even a little less
and I'd start with the JVM memory pressure to debug: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/high-jvm-memory-pressure.html -
@chris @jerome @EdwinG the main pain you'll experience is that by default elasticsearch assumes it should use the entire machine / VM / container. so it allocates 50% of the memory for its heap. if you have a 16GB instance, it doesn't automatically need 8GB for the heap. but you need to tell it what you feel is appropriate
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Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸replied to Philipp Krenn last edited by
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Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸replied to Philipp Krenn last edited by
@xeraa Thanks again for your help.
I set it down to
-Xms1g
-Xmx1g
elasticsearch reports: heap size [1gb], compressed ordinary object pointers [true]I have a fairly active account, but my little instance is relatively quiet as there are only three of us on it.
I had originally set the heap size to Xmx/Xms2G as recommended in the Mastodon docs. But maybe that's too much for my purposes and I should have reduced rather than increased its memory.
The log seems very quiet, but no obvious errors that I can see.
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Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸replied to Philipp Krenn last edited by
@xeraa I'm not sure setting it to a lower value has done much good. This is the report from htop. There are 50+ processes from elasticsearch all claiming 7.1% memory which obviously adds to more than 100% so I'm thinking this is causing some serious issues here. The system is very sluggish.
