17.5. Server Performance Tuning

17.5.1. Specifying Neo4j tuning properties
17.5.2. Specifying JVM tuning properties

At the heart of the Neo4j server is a regular Neo4j storage engine instance. That engine can be tuned in the same way as the other embedded configurations, using the same file format. The only difference is that the server must be told where to find the fine-tuning configuration.

17.5.1. Specifying Neo4j tuning properties

The conf/neo4j-server.properties file in the server distribution, is the main configuration file for the server. In this file we can specify a second properties file that contains the database tuning settings (that is, the neo4j.properties file). This is done by setting a single property to point to a valid neo4j.properties file:

org.neo4j.server.db.tuning.properties={neo4j.properties file}

On restarting the server the tuning enhancements specified in the neo4j.properties file will be loaded and configured into the underlying database engine.

17.5.2. Specifying JVM tuning properties

Tuning the standalone server is achieved by editing the neo4j-wrapper.conf file in the conf directory of NEO4J_HOME.

Edit the following properties:

neo4j-wrapper.conf JVM tuning properties

Property Name Meaning

wrapper.java.initmemory

initial heap size (in MB)

wrapper.java.maxmemory

maximum heap size (in MB)

wrapper.java.additional.N

additional literal JVM parameter, where N is a number for each


For more information on the tuning properties, see Section 21.4, “JVM Settings”.