Some systems default to a nofile ulimit of 65535. To reduce the pain of
deploying Elasticsearch to such systems, this commit lowers the required
limit from 65536 to 65535.
This commit reorganizes some of the content in the configuring
Elasticsearch section of the docs. The changes are:
- move JVM options out of system configuration into configuring
Elasticsearch
- move JVM options to its own page of the docs
- move configuring the heap to important Elasticsearch settings
- move configuring the heap to its own page of the docs
- move all important settings to individual pages in the docs
- remove bootstrap.memory_lock from important settings, this is covered
in the swap section of system configuration
Relates #27755
JDK 9 has removed JVM options that were valid in JDK 8 (e.g., GC logging
flags) and replaced them with new flags that are not available in JDK
8. This means that a single JVM options file can no longer apply to JDK
8 and JDK 9, complicating development, complicating our packaging story,
and complicating operations. This commit extends the JVM options syntax
to specify the range of versions the option applies to. If the running
JVM matches the range of versions, the flag will be used to start the
JVM otherwise the flag will be ignored.
We implement this parser in Java for simplicity, and with this we start
our first step towards a Java launcher.
Relates #27675
On non-Windows platforms, we ignore the environment variable
JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS (this is an environment variable that the JVM respects
by default for picking up extra JVM options). The primary reason that we
ignore this because of the Jayatana agent on Ubuntu; a secondary reason
is that it produces an annoying "Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: ..."
output message. When the elasticsearch-env batch script was introduced
for Windows, ignoring this environment variable was deliberately not
carried over as the primary reason does not apply on Windows. However,
after additional thinking, it seems that we should simply be consistent
to the extent possible here (and also avoid that annoying "Picked up
JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: ..." on Windows too). This commit causes the Windows
version of elasticsearch-env to also ignore JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS.
Relates #25968
When overriding a systemd configuration via a drop-in file, the
[Service] header is required. This commit adds this to an example
drop-in override in the configuring docs.
Relates #22038
Elasticsearch can be run in a few different ways:
- from the command line on Linux and Windows
- as a service on Linux and Windows
on both 32-bit client and 64-bit server VMs. We strive for a great
out-of-the-box experience any of these combinations but today it is
lacking on 32-bit client JVMs and on the Windows service. There are two
deficiencies that arise:
- on any 32-bit client JVM we fail to start out of the box because we
force the server JVM in jvm.options
- when installing the Windows service, the thread stack size must be
specified in jvm.options
This commit attempts to address these deficiencies.
We should continue to force the server JVM because there are systems
where the server JVM is not active by default (e.g., the 32-bit JDK on
Windows). This does mean that if a user tries to run with a client JVM
they will see a failure message at startup but this is the best that we
can do if we want to continue to force the server JVM. Thus, this commit
at least documents this situation.
To improve the situation with installing the Windows service, this
commit adds a default setting for the thread stack size. This default is
chosen based on the default thread stack size across all 64-bit server
JVMs. This means that if a user tries to run with a 32-bit JVM they
could otherwise see significantly higher memory usage (this situation is
complicated, it's really only on Windows where the extra memory usage is
egregious, but cutting into the 32-bit address space on any system is
bad). So this commit makes it so that the out-of-the-box experience is
improved for the Windows service on 64-bit server JVMs and we document
the need to adjust this setting on 32-bit JVMs.
Again, we are focusing on the out-of-the-box experience here and this
means optimizing for the best experience on any 64-bit server JVM as
this covers the vast majority of the user base. The users that are on
32-bit JVMs will suffer a little bit but at least now any user on any
64-bit server JVM can start Elasticsearch out of the box.
Finally, we fix some references to the jvm.options documentation.
Relates #21920
This commit adds a new configuration file jvm.options to centralize and
simplify management of JVM options. This separates the configuration of
the JVM from the packaging scripts (bin/elasticsearch*, bin/service.bat,
and init.d/elasticsearch) simplifying end-user operational management of
custom JVM options.
Jason Tedor
Nicolas Sierra
Jared Carey
Clinton Gormley