Hi Csaba,

It’s difficult to give a general advice; XML documents are just too different. In principle, a few GB or even MB can be sufficient to create databases for very large collections (10 GB and more), but sometimes namespaces are a showstopper. See [1] for some statistics.

What’s the total size of your XML documents? Can you create the database if you enable the text and attribute index?

Best,

Christian

[1] https://docs.basex.org/main/Statistics

On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 2:10 PM Csaba Fekete <feketecsaba@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi
I have a web server that runs Basex 11.1. The server is a VPS with 18G of RAM.
I have a directory of documents in various sizes, ranging from a few kilobytes up to 2G.
I am trying to import these documents with the command
CREATE DB mydb /path/to/docs
With the default jvm max heap size (2GB) I get the error: Out of main memory
If I raise the max heap size to 4GB, I get the same error.
If I raise it to 8GB, the system becomes unresponsive.
How can I determine how much system memory I need to be able to carry out this task?
Thanks