# Advice on Heap usage

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/advice-on-heap-usage/217752>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [February 4, 2020, 9:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/advice-on-heap-usage/217752 "2020-02-04T09:33:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![royal\_man](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/royal_man/32/67426_2.png) [@royal\_man](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/royal_man)\
**Post date:** [February 4, 2020, 10:19am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/advice-on-heap-usage/217752/4 "2020-02-04T10:19:40Z")

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I found this discussion. Thanks.

> [@JVM Heap Advice from documentation](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/jvm-heap-advice-from-documentation/169827/4):
>
> Note that the documentation gives 50% as a recommended upper limit, not a target: Set Xmx to no more than 50% of your physical RAM You can of course set it lower. I think that reducing the heap size also reduces the space available for off-heap data (they share a limit) but you are right that it increases the space available for filesystem cache. Would that improve performance? It depends™ slight_smile It means a full GC would be faster, but maybe more frequent, and means it can cache …

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