By default, Elasticsearch will use between 256MB and 1GB of memory. On my dev environment, memory is a premium and I don’t really have a lot of data to index and play with so I’d prefer this to be closer to 256m

To change this, navigate to
/usr/local/Cellar/elasticsearch/x.xx.x/bin

(where x.xx.x is the Elasticsarch version number)
open up elasticsearch.in.sh

then replace the memory size in the following lines

if [ "x$ES_MIN_MEM" = "x" ]; then
    ES_MIN_MEM=256m
fi
if [ "x$ES_MAX_MEM" = "x" ]; then
    ES_MAX_MEM=1g
fi

It is recommended that you set both ES_MIN_MEM and ES_MAX_MEM to the max size you want so that Elasticsearch doesn’t have to pause to resize memory, which can affect performance.

from the comments in that file …

min and max heap sizes should be set to the same value to avoid
stop-the-world GC pauses during resize, and so that we can lock the
heap in memory on startup to prevent any of it from being swapped
out.