title: Configure memory boxes
role: manual
tags: #configuration #manual #zettelstore
syntax: zmk
back: 00001004011200
backward: 00001004011200
box-number: 1
copyright: (c) 2020-present by Detlef Stern <ds@zettelstore.de>
created: 20220307112918
lang: en
license: EUPL-1.2-or-later
modified: 20250627155851
published: 20250627155851
visibility: public

Under most circumstances, it is preferable to further configure a memory box.
This is done by appending query parameters after the base box URI ''mem:''.

The following parameters are supported:
|=: Parameter|=Description|=:Default value|=:Maximum value
|:max-bytes|Maximum number of bytes the box will store|:65535|:1073741824 (1 GiB)
|:max-zettel|Maximum number of zettel|:127|:65535
The default values are somewhat arbitrary but applicable to many use cases.

While the number of zettel should be easily calculable by a user, the number of bytes might be a bit more difficult to determine.

Metadata consumes 6 bytes for the zettel identifier, plus one byte for the separator for each metadata value, in addition to the length of the key and data.
The size of the content is its size in bytes. For text content, this corresponds to the number of bytes in its UTF-8 encoding.

If one of the limits is exceeded, Zettelstore will return an error indicated by the HTTP status code 507.