Memory, Disk Space, and Swap Space Requirements

Before installing the software, be sure that your system meets the following requirements:

For a production deployment, MarkLogic recommends at least 8 vCPUs per host, with 8 GB of memory per vCPU. For example, for a production host with 16 vCPUs the recommended memory is at least 128 GB. For bare-metal systems, a hardware thread (hyperthread), is equivalent to a vCPU. Use memory optimized cloud compute instances or virtual machines. Memory requirements may increase over time as projects evolve and databases grow with more content and more indexes. See comment 1 in the following table.
For a prototyping or development deployment, MarkLogic requires a minimum of 4 GB of system memory and recommends at least 8 GB of memory. See comment 1 in the following table.
For small forests that will not grow, such as Security and Schemas, the reserve size is two times the size of the forest.
For data forests, we recommend a size of 500 GB, where 400 GB is allocated to content, and 100 GB is left as reserved space to handle merges. See comment 2 in the following table for details about this storage calculation.
On Linux systems, you need at least as much swap space as the amount of physical memory on the machine or 32 GB, whichever is lower.
If you have Huge Pages set up on a Linux system, your swap space on that machine must be at least the size of your physical memory minus the size of your Huge Pages (because Linux Huge Pages are not swapped), or 32 GB, whichever is lower. For example, if you have 48 GB of physical memory, and if you have Huge Pages set to 18 GB, then you need swap space of 30 GB (48 - 18). For details on setting up Huge Pages, see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1578873 on the Red Hat website.
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At system startup on Linux machines, MarkLogic Server logs a message to the ErrorLog.txt file showing the size of the Huge Pages, and the message indicates if the size is below the recommended level.
If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, you must turn off Transparent Huge Pages (Transparent Huge Pages are configured automatically by the operating system). For details on disabling Transparent Huge Pages, see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1320153.
On Windows systems, twice the physical memory is also recommended for the swap (page) file. For Windows 10, you configure this by searching for View Advanced System Settings in the taskbar. Next, click the icon. Then, in the Performance area, click Settings > Advanced and set the virtual memory to twice the physical memory. For earlier Windows systems, click System Control Panel > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Advanced tab and set the virtual memory settings to twice the physical memory.

No	Comment
[1]	MarkLogic automatically configures itself to reserve as much system memory as it can the first time it runs. If you need to change the default configuration, you can manually override these defaults later, using the Admin Interface.
[2]	For content forests that are expected to grow over time, with the default merge settings, you need to reserve 100 GB of storage. Here is the calculation: You need at least 2 times the `merge max size` of free space per forest, regardless of the forest size. Therefore, with the default `merge max size` of 48 GB, you need at least 96 GB of free space. Additionally, if your journals are not yet created, you need 2 times the journal size of free disk space (if the journal space is not yet allocated). Therefore, to be safe, you need 100 GB of free space for each content forest.

Comment

[1]

MarkLogic automatically configures itself to reserve as much system memory as it can the first time it runs. If you need to change the default configuration, you can manually override these defaults later, using the Admin Interface.

[2]

For content forests that are expected to grow over time, with the default merge settings, you need to reserve 100 GB of storage. Here is the calculation:

You need at least 2 times the merge max size of free space per forest, regardless of the forest size. Therefore, with the default merge max size of 48 GB, you need at least 96 GB of free space. Additionally, if your journals are not yet created, you need 2 times the journal size of free disk space (if the journal space is not yet allocated). Therefore, to be safe, you need 100 GB of free space for each content forest.

In this section:

Installing MarkLogic Server