I haven't found this to be the case in my experience. Although I may be misunderstanding, but this is my experience running Meili in prod:
* Meili uses 50% RAM
* I use 10-20% with another script to occasionally index new data
* When indexing, Meili could jump to use 70-80% RAM
* Meili is OOM killed
Right. We released a lot of new versions of the engine to improve the indexing part of it. V1.12 is improving the document indexing a lot! Have you tried the latest version v1.14 we released yesterday?
While Meilisearch is capable of limiting it's resident (actual mallocs) memory. However, it requires a bare minimum (about 1GiB).