# Heap usage holds steady at max and GC does not run. Need to force restart the cluster

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heap-usage-holds-steady-at-max-and-gc-does-not-run-need-to-force-restart-the-cluster/335176>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Tags:** elastic-stack-monitoring\
**Created:** [June 5, 2023, 2:50am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heap-usage-holds-steady-at-max-and-gc-does-not-run-need-to-force-restart-the-cluster/335176 "2023-06-05T02:50:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jorge\_Eguiguren](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/jorge_eguiguren/32/120418_2.png) [@Jorge\_Eguiguren](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jorge_Eguiguren)\
**Post date:** [June 8, 2023, 11:53pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heap-usage-holds-steady-at-max-and-gc-does-not-run-need-to-force-restart-the-cluster/335176/5 "2023-06-08T23:53:39Z")

</div>

Hey Christian, thank you for the quick reply. Looking at our configuration, we noticed we had none of the GC configurations set up.

`GET /_nodes/jvm?pretty` showed

```auto
   "input_arguments" : [
          "-Xshare:auto",
          "-Des.networkaddress.cache.ttl=60",
          "-Des.networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=10",
          "-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch",
          "-Xss1m",
          "-Djava.awt.headless=true",
          "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8",
          "-Djna.nosys=true",
          "-XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow",
          "-XX:+ShowCodeDetailsInExceptionMessages",
          "-Dio.netty.noUnsafe=true",
          "-Dio.netty.noKeySetOptimization=true",
          "-Dio.netty.recycler.maxCapacityPerThread=0",
          "-Dio.netty.allocator.numDirectArenas=0",
          "-Dlog4j.shutdownHookEnabled=false",
          "-Dlog4j2.disable.jmx=true",
          "-Djava.locale.providers=SPI,COMPAT",
          "-Xms28g",
          "-Xmx28g"
]

```

We went ahead and copied the default configs from [elasticsearch/jvm.options at 7.10 · elastic/elasticsearch · GitHub](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.10/distribution/src/config/jvm.options)

Our JVM configs are now the following, and the cluster seems to be doing much better.

```auto
   "input_arguments" : [
          "-Xshare:auto",
          "-Des.networkaddress.cache.ttl=60",
          "-Des.networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl=10",
          "-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch",
          "-Xss1m",
          "-Djava.awt.headless=true",
          "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8",
          "-Djna.nosys=true",
          "-XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow",
          "-XX:+ShowCodeDetailsInExceptionMessages",
          "-Dio.netty.noUnsafe=true",
          "-Dio.netty.noKeySetOptimization=true",
          "-Dio.netty.recycler.maxCapacityPerThread=0",
          "-Dio.netty.allocator.numDirectArenas=0",
          "-Dlog4j.shutdownHookEnabled=false",
          "-Dlog4j2.disable.jmx=true",
          "-Djava.locale.providers=SPI,COMPAT",
          "-Xms28g",
          "-Xmx28g",
          "-XX:+UseG1GC",
          "-XX:G1ReservePercent=25",
          "-XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=30",
          "-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError",
          "-XX:+HeapDumpBeforeFullGC",
          "-XX:HeapDumpPath=/var/log/elasticsearch",
          "-Xlog:gc*,gc+age=trace,safepoint:file=/var/log/elasticsearch/gc.log:utctime,pid,tags:filecount=32,filesize=64m",
          "-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=15032385536",
          "-Des.path.home=/usr/share/elasticsearch",
          "-Des.path.conf=/etc/elasticsearch",
          "-Des.distribution.flavor=default",
          "-Des.distribution.type=rpm",
          "-Des.bundled_jdk=true"
        ]

```

Looking at the convo in [Garbage Collection Not Working - #5 by danielmitterdorfer](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/garbage-collection-not-working/197173/5)

I imagine our cluster was running with a GC implicitly chosen by the JVM, which was clearly not running as needed.

Again, thanks for the help!

---

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