Workflow not handling MB-sized data volumes in self-hosted n8n CE

Questions
1

Hello n8n community,

I’m running a self-hosted n8n Community Edition instance and facing issues when processing data files of several MB in size.

Whenever my workflow tries to handle these larger payloads (for example, JSON or CSV files), the workflow either:

  • Times out

  • Fails to complete

  • Or becomes unresponsive

Is there a recommended way to handle MB-sized payloads in n8n CE?
Any insights, best practices, or solutions would be greatly appreciated!

2

To handle MB-sized payloads in your self-hosted n8n CE instance, you can increase the payload size limit and optimize how binary data is stored. Start by setting the `N8N_PAYLOAD_SIZE_MAX` environment variable to a higher value (e.g., 256MB) to accommodate larger files ([tva.sg](Solving n8n “Existing execution data is too large” Error: The Complete Fix for Self-Hosted Instances – tva.sg)). Additionally, switch the binary data mode to `filesystem` using `N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem` to reduce memory usage ([docs.n8n.io](Scaling binary data in n8n | n8n Docs)). These changes should help improve performance for larger data volumes.