Kafka broker JVM settings below 1GB

Question

I am running a standalone kafka broker on an EC2 4GB RAM instance. In the default settings, Kafka is configured to use 1GB memory -Xmx1G -Xms1G

Since the VM has only 4GB memory, is it possible to configure the JVM settings to use 512MB? How should I do that? Will Kafka run properly with 512MB memory or is 1GB the minimum required?

Answer 1

To set your own JVM heap settings, you just have to export KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS and Kafka will pick it up when starting.

For example, to set the heap to 512MB, run

export KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS="-Xmx512m -Xms512M"