Add documentation for low-memory environments

[maximecorbeau]

I'm trying to run metabase on cloud9 but it keeps crashing.

Metabase starts properly:

$ sudo java -jar metabase.jar 
05-12 06:35:26 INFO metabase.core :: Starting Metabase in STANDALONE mode
05-12 06:35:26 INFO metabase.core :: Launching Embedded Jetty Webserver with config:
 {:port 3000}

05-12 06:35:27 INFO metabase.core :: Starting Metabase version v0.17.0 (6b3ec87 release-0.17.0) ...
05-12 06:35:27 INFO metabase.core :: System timezone is 'Etc/UTC' ...
05-12 06:35:33 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :bigquery ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :druid ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :h2 ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :mongo ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :mysql ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :postgres ??
05-12 06:35:34 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :redshift ??
05-12 06:35:35 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :sqlite ??
05-12 06:35:35 DEBUG metabase.driver :: Registered driver :sqlserver ??
05-12 06:35:37 INFO metabase.db :: Verifying Database Connection ...
05-12 06:35:39 INFO metabase.db :: Verify Database Connection ... ✅

But very quickly it eats up all my memory, and cloud9 kills it:

It says it crashes on mongod but there is nothing wrong with mongod itself: I've been running mongo for months without any issues. However everytime I try to run metabase (tried 4 times), it crashes with the memory issue.

My Mongo databases are small:

Cocoon            0.022GB
Test_Undeveloped  0.001GB
Undeveloped       0.017GB
admin             0.000GB
ga_cache          0.000GB
github            0.087GB
local             0.000GB
mytestdb          0.000GB
simulations       0.000GB
test              0.003GB

Is there anything I can do to limit the memory usage from metabase?

I'm running java version 1.8.0_91, I had same issue when running 1.7

[tlrobinson]

@maximecorbeau Can you try something like java -Xmx300m -Xss512k -jar metabase.jar? We're able to run on small Heroku dynos which are allocated 512MB of RAM.

Related: #1317

[maximecorbeau]

@tlrobinson It fixed the issue, thanks.

[tlrobinson]

@metabase/core-developers We should probably add some documentation for low memory situations like this.

[agilliland]

👍

It's odd that the jvm didn't come up with more sensible memory constraints. typically that happens automatically when the jvm starts up and sensible memory settings are inferred from the system, but it sounds like that didn't work properly on cloud9

[camsaul]

We do have documentation for this now, for example here: https://metabase.com/docs/latest/troubleshooting-guide/running.html

Closing as fixed