In ArangoDB, Could I disable the V8 engine if we don't use any JS procedures?

Question

Could I disable the V8 engine to release the V8's huge memory usage, if we don't use any JS procedures?

And what features of ArangoDB are internally implemented by JavaScript?

Thanks :-)

Answer 1

No, you can't deactivate V8 inside of ArangoDB. A lot of the API is powered by JavaScript as well as most of the graph functionality. If you would 'deactivate' V8, ArangoDB would not work anymore.

If it is possible for you to share information on how you use ArangoDB and what memory usage you are seeing, please share it on ArangoDB's mailing list or the bugtracker . People there might be able to debug this behaviour or help you reduce your memory usage.

Answer 2

As of ArangoDB version 3.4 you can turn off V8 with:

--javascript.enabled false
--foxx.queues false

however, the following features will be unavailable:

• Backend parts of the web interface
• Foxx Apps
• Foxx Queues
• GraphQL
• JavaScript-based transactions
• User-defined AQL functions

Also, a note for clustered ArangoDB:

Note that JavaScript / V8 can be disabled for DB-Server and Agency nodes in a cluster without these limitations. They apply to single server instances. They also apply to Coordinator nodes, but you should not disable V8 on Coordinators because certain cluster operations depend on it.

https://www.arangodb.com/2019/03/small-steps-reduce-arangodb-resource-footprint/