Docker toolbox cannot allocate memory

Question

I'm trying to get Docker running a container locally on my mac that I've been working on in the cloud. I did the docker commit/save/load find. But when I got to run it locally after I installed docker toolbox I get this error

docker logs es-loaded-with-data
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: INFO: os::commit_memory(0x00000006c5330000, 4207738880, 0) failed; error='Cannot allocate memory' (errno=12)
Starting elasticsearch: #
# There is insufficient memory for the Java Runtime Environment to continue.
# Native memory allocation (mmap) failed to map 4207738880 bytes for committing reserved memory.
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# //hs_err_pid16.log

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: INFO: os::commit_memory(0x00000006c5330000, 4207738880, 0) failed; error='Cannot allocate memory' (errno=12)
Starting elasticsearch: #

If I do docker info then I get

Total Memory: 1.956 GiB

clearly 2 Gb isn't enough. How do I increase it so my container will run?

Answer 1

Docker on Mac OS runs inside a virtualbox VM with either docker-machine (or older boot2docker). I am not sure if docker-machine supports modifying the VM RAM directly, but you can probably just start the VirtualBox.app and modify the amount of VM Memory directly. Restart the VM et voilá.