Spring Cloud microservices memory usage
We've investigated a number of things in a similar setup in terms of the JVM itself. A quick way to save some memory if using Java 8 is to use the following options:
-Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:-TieredCompilation -Xss256k -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+UseStringDeduplicationThe G1GC is well documented, the UseStringDeduplication reduces heap usage by de-duplicating the storage of Strings in the heap (we found about 20% in a JSON/XML web service type environment), and the TieredCompilation makes a big difference in the use of CodeCache (from 70Mb down to 10Mb), as well as about 10% less Metaspace at the expense of about 10% startup time.
According to Spring's Installing Spring Boot applications page you can customize the application startup script by either environment variable or configuration file with the JAVA_OPTS variable.
For example: JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx64m