DEV Community

Cover image for Elasticsearch installation issue on a free tier (t2.micro) AWS EC2 instance
Sung M. Kim
Sung M. Kim

Posted on • Originally published at slightedgecoder.com on

Elasticsearch installation issue on a free tier (t2.micro) AWS EC2 instance

I installed Elasticsearch 6.x on a free tier AWS EC2 instance type, t2.micro by followinginstallation instruction (for Elasticsearch 5 ) by Adnan Sabanovic on medium.

Adnan used a cURL command to check if Elasticsearch is running or not.

But then the command returned the following error message.

curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 9200: Connection refused

What happened?

Diagnosis

Let’s see the status of Elasticsearch by running systemctl comamnd.

On line #9, you can see the warning “OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning” and the line #10 shows that the Elasticsearch service main process has existed right away.

Updating Elasticsearch 6.x JVM Heap Size

By default Elasticsearch 6.x JVM Heap size set to use minimum 1Gig of memory.

But t2.micro has 1Gig of memory

Elasticsearch documentation recommends to set it to 50% of physical memory for kernel file system caches.

We know the problem, so let’s change the Elasticsearch JVM heap size.

Open /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.option using an editor of your choice (I promise that I will learn either vi or emacs… 😞)

When you read the comment in jvm.options, you should set the minimum and maximum to the same value.

And you can see that the min and max JVM heap sizes are set to 1g on the bottom of above image.

-Xms1g

-Xmx1g

Now update the min and max values to 512m, save the file and exit.

Restart and Test

Restart Elasticsearch service,

and run the cURL command again.

🎉Tada🎉
Elasticsearch is now running on AWS EC2 t.micro instance.

The post Elasticsearch installation issue on a free tier (t2.micro) AWS EC2 instance appeared first on Slight Edge Coder.

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
thejoezack profile image
Joe Zack

Wow, great catch - I didn't realize there was a minimum! Seems like something I'd spend hours on.

Collapse
 
dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim

Thanks Joe.

The error message doesn't reveal much so digging into the source is what takes time.

It takes only a minute to fix the issue :)