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PASSEDcache / memory_exhaustion
Memcached 1.6 Memory Leak — Heap Growing Unbounded on Fedora 40 Server
Memcached 1.6 has a memory leak causing heap/RSS to grow continuously. Memory usage at 80% and climbing. Performance severely degraded.
Pattern
MEMORY_EXHAUSTION
Severity
CRITICAL
Confidence
72%
Remediation
Auto-Heal
Test Results
| Metric | Expected | Actual | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pattern Recognition | MEMORY_EXHAUSTION | MEMORY_EXHAUSTION | |
| Severity Assessment | HIGH | CRITICAL | |
| Incident Correlation | N/A | None | |
| Cascade Escalation | N/A | No | |
| Remediation | — | Auto-Heal — Corax resolves autonomously |
Scenario Conditions
Fedora 40 Server. Memcached 1.6 RSS at 4GB (limit: 5GB). Memory growing 2MB/hour. GC/eviction not keeping up. Swap pressure increasing.
Injected Error Messages (1)
Memcached 1.6 memory leak on Fedora 40 Server — memory critical, RSS 4GB/5GB (80%), out of memory imminent, growing 2MB/hour, garbage collection overhead 26%
Neural Engine Root Cause Analysis
Memory exhaustion detected — the system has run out of available memory, triggering the OOM killer or forcing heavy swap usage. This causes severe performance degradation and can result in random process termination. Memory leaks in long-running applications are a common root cause, especially after deployments or configuration changes.
Remediation Plan
1. Check which process was OOM-killed using 'dmesg | grep -i oom' or journal logs.
2. Review memory usage by process with 'ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -20'.
3. Restart the affected service to reclaim leaked memory.
4. If a memory leak is suspected, enable heap profiling and analyze memory allocation patterns.
5. Consider increasing server memory or setting appropriate memory limits (cgroups/container limits).
Improvements Applied
- Severity: CRITICAL (expected HIGH)
Tested: 2026-04-02Monitors: 1 | Incidents: 1Test ID: cmnhnpjby02z4lig7ktsaiet2