Where to set MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited in Elasticsearch 5.0

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I run Ubuntu 16.04 in my production environment.

I downloaded Elasticsearch 5.0 from TAR.

According to this post, I can set MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited in /etc/default/elasticsearch on Ubuntu 14.04, but there is no such file in that directory. I even created /etc/default/elasticsearch and put MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited in that file, but it didn't work.

Where can I set MAX_LOCKED_MEMORY=unlimited in my situation?

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If you're running from the tar archive, /etc/default/elasticsearch and so on will never have any effect (it's only sourced by the System V init files). Instead, you have to modify /etc/security/limits.conf or create /etc/security/limits.d/elasticsearch.conf and set

<username of user that will be running Elasticsearch> - memlock unlimited

and start a new login shell for this to be picked up.

2 Likes
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Thank you for your reply.
Could you tell me how to start a new login shell for the setting to be picked up?
I run systems using systemd, so I ran systemctl daemon-reload after the setup (Please tell me if this is a wrong command.).
But I still get an error like the follows.

[2017-02-12T10:44:16,561][WARN ][o.e.b.JNANatives         ] Unable to lock JVM Memory: error=12, reason=Cannot allocate memory
[2017-02-12T10:44:16,564][WARN ][o.e.b.JNANatives         ] This can result in part of the JVM being swapped out.
[2017-02-12T10:44:16,564][WARN ][o.e.b.JNANatives         ] Increase RLIMIT_MEMLOCK, soft limit: 65536, hard limit: 65536
[2017-02-12T10:44:16,564][WARN ][o.e.b.JNANatives         ] These can be adjusted by modifying /etc/security/limits.conf, for example: 
    # allow user 'ubuntu' mlockall
    ubuntu soft memlock unlimited
    ubuntu hard memlock unlimited

After I received this error, I set ubuntu soft memlock unlimited and ubuntu hard memlock unlimited in /etc/security/limits.conf and ran systemctl daemon-reload.
But the error doesn't disappear.

Now I looked into this doc in which they say there is another option to disable swapping.
That option is to comment out any lines that contain the word swap in /etc/fstab, but there is no lines with the word in the first place in that file. Does this mean I don't have to do anything and it's configured correctly out of the box?

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You said you're using the tar archive, not a package install that would setup systemd for you. Since you're not using systemd, there's no need to run any systemd commands here. To start a new login shell just logout and login again.

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Oh, excuse my lack of knowledge.
Yes, I downloaded Elasticsearch from TAR.
After logging out and logging in, it worked.
Thank you.

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You're very welcome.

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