How to allow h2o to access all available memory?

Question

I am running h2o through Rstudio Server on a linux server with 64 GB of RAM. When I initialize the cluster it says that the total cluster memory is only 9.78 GB. I have tried using the max_mem_size parameter but still only using 9.78 GB.

localH2O <<- h2o.init(ip =  "localhost", port = 54321, nthreads = -1, max_mem_size = "25g")
H2O is not running yet, starting it now...
java version "1.8.0_131"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_131-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.131-b11, mixed mode)
    Connection successful!
    R is connected to the H2O cluster: 
        H2O cluster uptime:         5 hours 10 minutes 
        H2O cluster version:        3.10.4.6 
        H2O cluster version age:    19 days  
        H2O cluster name:           H2O_started_from_R_miweis_mxv543 
        H2O cluster total nodes:    1 
        H2O cluster total memory:   9.78 GB 
        H2O cluster total cores:    16 
        H2O cluster allowed cores:  16 
        H2O cluster healthy:        TRUE 
        H2O Connection ip:          localhost 
        H2O Connection port:        54321 
        H2O Connection proxy:       NA 
        H2O Internal Security:      FALSE 
        R Version:                  R version 3.3.3 (2017-03-06) 

I ran the following on the server to insure the amount of memory available:

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       65806476 kB

EDIT:

I was looking more into this issue and it seems like it is a default within the JVM. When I started h2o directly in Java I was able to pass in the command -Xmx32g and it did increase the memory. I could then connect to that h2o instance in Rstudio and have access to the increases memory. I was wondering if there was a way to change this default value in the JVM and allow more memory so I don't have to first start the h2o instance from the command line then connect to it from Rstudio server.

Answer 1

The max_mem_size argument in the h2o R package is functional, so you can use it to start an H2O cluster of whatever size you want -- you don't need to start it from the command line using -Xmx.

What's seems to be happening in your case is that you are connecting to an existing H2O cluster located at localhost:54321 that was limited to "10G" (in reality, 9.78 GB). So when you run h2o.init() from R, it will just connect to the existing cluster (with a fixed memory), rather than starting a new H2O cluster with the memory that you specified in max_mem_size, and so the memory request gets ignored.

To fix, you should do one of the following:

• Kill the existing H2O cluster at localhost:54321 and restart from R with the desired memory requirement, or
• start a cluster from R at different IP/port than the one that's already running.