Non-linear increase in the response time to grow concurrency

We're using VMWare Esxi virtual machines with ElasticSearch 0.19.8 cluster
and have some troubleshooting to do.

Index size is about 50Mb, Virtual machines RAM 2Gb. Testing via
ApacheBenchmark tool gives 1-3ms response time with concurrency 1, 10-30ms
with concurrency 5, 100-300ms with concurrency 10. Concurrency more than 10
fully crashes the system.

How do we properly configure ElasticSearch to increase concurrencies?