How does ES use RAM? Speccing new server.

invalid@example.com (RobParker), RobParker
Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:29:51 +0000
Enhanced Search support

I was hoping someone could give me a quick answer.

Our hosts (Nimbus, who are excellent) are looking to move us to a new server but it'd have less memory.

I'm a little confused on how this would impact ES.

Our live stats show:
KiB Mem : 32652304 total, 5929716 free, 9955640 used, 16766948 buff/cache

I thought a lot of this buffer/cache was ES but our hosts said that ES is using only 6% of the memory (so around 2GB):
PID USER %MEM COMMAND
22671 elastic+ 6.3

In...