SCALE 19x logo
Los Angeles, CA
July 2022

The Curious Case of Memory Growth

Audience:

Weeks to months after a routine upgrade from systemd 247 to systemd 248, engineers at Meta discovered a very gradual growth of memory usage in systemd-journald, from 20 MB to over 300 MB and growing. It's not a memory leak! What could it be? Come hear about how we detected it, how we tracked down the cause, what the root cause was, and how it was fixed.

Most of the tools used to track down the root cause are freely available, such as the ones from the BCC toolkit and Valgrind. I'll be briefly covering what worked well and what didn't work as well. So as not to spoil the talk, I'll say the root cause was unintuitive and a fair bit of the talk will be dedicated to discussing what happened.

Room:
Century AB
Time:
Saturday, July 30, 2022 - 11:30 to 12:30