Helix Core is now P4. Product user interfaces will be updated soon. Learn more >>

P4 Server Administration Documentation | 2025.1

# Memory

Server performance is highly dependent upon having sufficient memory. I/O requests that can be satisfied from a larger filesystem cache complete faster than requests that must be satisfied from beyond the filesystem cache.

Ensure that:

- the server doesn’t page or swap when it runs large queries
- the often-used pages from the `db.*` files can be cached in memory

Although most operations involve only a subset of files, multiple large operations can be performed simultaneously, and thus might require more memory to avoid paging.

Assuming you follow the best practice of having a device that contains only the database files, one way to determine if you have allocated sufficient memory is to verify that the physical read rate on this device is minimal.

Your search for returned results