In certain situations, you may want Bazel to use minimal memory. You can set the maximum heap via the startup flag --host_jvm_args, like --host_jvm_args=-Xmx2g.
However, if your builds are big enough, Bazel may throw an OutOfMemoryError (OOM) when it doesn't have enough memory. You can make Bazel use less memory, at the cost of slower incremental builds, by passing the following command flags: --discard_analysis_cache, --nokeep_state_after_build, and --notrack_incremental_state.
These flags will minimize the memory that Bazel uses in a build, at the cost of making future builds slower than a standard incremental build would be.
You can also pass any one of these flags individually:
--discard_analysis_cache will reduce the memory used during execution (not analysis). Incremental builds will not have to redo package loading, but will have to redo analysis and execution (although the on-disk action cache can prevent most re-execution).--notrack_incremental_state will not store any edges in Bazel's internal dependency graph, so that it is unusable for incremental builds. The next build will discard that data, but it is preserved until then, for internal debugging, unless --nokeep_state_after_build is specified.--nokeep_state_after_build will discard all data after the build, so that incremental builds have to build from scratch (except for the on-disk action cache). Alone, it does not affect the high-water mark of the current build.