Is there any option to limit mongodb memory usage?

Adding to the top voted answer, in case you are on a low memory machine and want to configure the wiredTigerCache in MBs instead of whole number GBs, use this -

storage:
 wiredTiger:
  engineConfig:
    configString : cache_size=345M

Source - https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-22274

mongod --wiredTigerCacheSizeGB 2 xx

There is no reason to limit MongoDB cache as by default the mongod process will take 1/2 of the memory on the machine and no more. The default storage engine is WiredTiger. "With WiredTiger, MongoDB utilizes both the WiredTiger internal cache and the filesystem cache."

You are probably looking at top and assuming that Mongo is using all the memory on your machine. That is virtual memory. Use free -m:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7982        1487        5601           8         893        6204
Swap:             0           0           0

Only when the available metric goes to zero is your computer swapping memory out to disk. In that case your database is too large for your machine. Add another mongodb instance to your cluster.

Use these two commands in the mongod console to get information about how much virtual and physical memory Mongodb is using:

var mem = db.serverStatus().tcmalloc;

mem.tcmalloc.formattedString

------------------------------------------------
MALLOC:      360509952 (  343.8 MiB) Bytes in use by application
MALLOC: +    477704192 (  455.6 MiB) Bytes in page heap freelist
MALLOC: +     33152680 (   31.6 MiB) Bytes in central cache freelist
MALLOC: +      2684032 (    2.6 MiB) Bytes in transfer cache freelist
MALLOC: +      3508952 (    3.3 MiB) Bytes in thread cache freelists
MALLOC: +      6349056 (    6.1 MiB) Bytes in malloc metadata
MALLOC:   ------------
MALLOC: =    883908864 (  843.0 MiB) Actual memory used (physical + swap)
MALLOC: +     33611776 (   32.1 MiB) Bytes released to OS (aka unmapped)
MALLOC:   ------------
MALLOC: =    917520640 (  875.0 MiB) Virtual address space used
MALLOC:
MALLOC:          26695              Spans in use
MALLOC:             22              Thread heaps in use
MALLOC:           4096              Tcmalloc page size

One thing you can limit is the amount of memory mongodb uses while building indexes. This is set using the maxIndexBuildMemoryUsageMegabytes setting. An example of how its set is below:

mongo --eval "db.adminCommand( { setParameter: 1, maxIndexBuildMemoryUsageMegabytes: 70000 } )"

this worked for me on an AWS instance, to at least clear the cached memory mongo was using. after this you can see how your settings have had effect.

ubuntu@hongse:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3952       3667        284          0        617        514
-/+ buffers/cache:       2535       1416
Swap:            0          0          0
ubuntu@hongse:~$ sudo su
root@hongse:/home/ubuntu# sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
root@hongse:/home/ubuntu# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3952       2269       1682          0          1         42
-/+ buffers/cache:       2225       1726
Swap:            0          0          0

If you're using Docker, reading the Docker image documentation (in the Setting WiredTiger cache size limits section) I found out that they set the default to consume all available memory regardless of memory limits you may have imposed on the container, so you would have to limit the RAM usage directly from the DB configuration.

1. Create you mongod.conf file:

# Limits cache storage
storage:
   wiredTiger:
      engineConfig:
         cacheSizeGB: 1 # Set the size you want

2. Now you can assign that config file to the container: docker run --name mongo-container -v /path/to/mongod.conf:/etc/mongo/mongod.conf -d mongo --config /etc/mongo/mongod.conf
3. Alternatively you could use a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3'

services:
    mongo:
        image: mongo:4.2
        # Sets the config file
        command: --config /etc/mongo/mongod.conf
        volumes:
            - ./config/mongo/mongod.conf:/etc/mongo/mongod.conf
        # Others settings...