Elasticsearch problem with new installation

Technical assistance
1

Hello everyone,

I’m currently testing Zammad, as we might want to switch from Znuny.

I successfully installed Zammad on Debian 12. Initially, everything worked perfectly.

Now I wanted to start the statistics in Zammad. I noticed that a window with a status code of 500 appears.

I then checked if the service was running on the Debian machine.

However, I’m getting an error message. I don’t really have any idea how to narrow down the problem.

Error message:

× elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/elasticsearch.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: signal) since Mon 2025-12-01 12:47:35 UTC; 16s ago
Duration: 1h 1min 17.603s
Docs: https://www.elastic.co
Process: 144832 ExecStart=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/systemd-entrypoint -p ${PID_DIR}/elasticsearch.pid --quiet (code=killed, signal=KILL)
Main PID: 144832 (code=killed, signal=KILL)
CPU: 7.601s

Dec 01 12:47:29 Zammad-Server systemd[1]: Starting elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch…
Dec 01 12:47:35 Zammad-Server systemd[1]: elasticsearch.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL
Dec 01 12:47:35 Zammad-Server systemd[1]: elasticsearch.service: Failed with result ‘signal’.
Dec 01 12:47:35 Zammad-Server systemd[1]: Failed to start elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch.
Dec 01 12:47:35 Zammad-Server systemd[1]: elasticsearch.service: Consumed 7.601s CPU time.

Can you help me narrow down the problem?

Thanks!

Best regards, Matthias

2

Honestly sounds like you had a visit from our favorite the memory reaper.
Checking with journalctl should actually tell you (you’re looking for oom along the lines).

As you didn’t use the provided template, it’s quite impossible to help you further.
I’m gonna assume that you did not restrict the memory usage of Elasticsearch (which you should) - search for heap-size in the Elastic Elasticsearch documentation.

I also am assuming that your machine does have enough resources.
I’ll link the hardware requirement documentation page of Zammad, just to be sure.

3

Oh yes, that’s right! That wasn’t entirely clear from the error message!

This is a test system for Zammad. I’ve now limited the memory usage to 512MB. That should be sufficient for testing.

The service is now starting up perfectly again.