The search service exceed 80% of its allocated memory

Issue

• We sometimes see the following warning in the Cloud console:

The search service exceeded 80% of its allocated memory.

Environment

• Liferay PaaS

Resolution

• The search service often presents high memory consumption, sometimes even using the entire container’s allotted memory, and is not necessarily a bad thing.
• This behavior is only be problematic if there are actual issues within the search service, such as  slowness, dropped connections, or 500 Internal Server Error messages.
• It is not necessarily a problem that Elasticsearch consumes high memory since search containers typically only have one relevant process and Elasticsearch is using that memory available. In fact, since releasing memory is a costly operation, it would be counterproductive to release the memory back to the container, since there is no other process in need of it. Typically, the JVM should eventually release that memory with a garbage collection.

Additional Information

• The ci service exceeded 80% of its allocated Memory