Performance is generally memory or I/O bound for large graphs, and compute bound for graphs that fit in memory.

More memory allows for larger graphs, but it needs to be configured properly to avoid disruptive garbage collection operations. See Memory configuration for suggestions.

Aside from capacity, the performance characteristics of the disk are the most important when selecting storage. Neo4j workloads tend significantly toward random reads. Select media with low average seek time: SSD over spinning disks. Consult Disks, RAM and other tips for more details.

For proper ACID behavior, the filesystem must support flush (fsync, fdatasync). See Linux file system tuning for a discussion on how to configure the filesystem in Linux for optimal performance.

Neo4j Desktop includes a Java Virtual Machine, JVM, for convenience. All other versions of Neo4j require Java to be pre-installed. The minimum requirement is the Java Runtime Environment, JRE.

The Java Development Kit, JDK, is required in order to run some commands of the Report tool. This is a tool that lets you send logs and performance data to Neo4j Customer Success in a convenient way, in case of a production issue. For this reason, JDK is recommended for all production environments that allow it.