[chef] Controling Memory usage

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Morning All,

I am running a chef 10.18.2 from the opscode repository on Ubuntu 12.04, and I
am managing 15 nodes, all running Ubuntu 12.04.

My issue is that something changed and the memory usage has exploded, and what
fit nicely in a VM with 2GB of RAM now crashes due to  OOM multiple times per
day.

My install differs from stock very little, I did have to increase the
maxFieldLength of the solr config to 100,000 due to searches failing to return
results with both 1,000 and 10,000.

Each crash is a bit different, but the worst offenders are usual, in order:
1) chef-server
2) chef-expander (Can eat up to 60% of memory before there is none left)
3) chef-server-webui (when I visit the status page)

Is 4GB of RAM simply too little for 15 nodes? IMHO it seems a bit excessive 
for
the size of the deployment.

I am not sure where to go to diagnose the issue, I prefer Chef's workflow and
would like to fix this so I can continue utilizing the system.

Brian