Lambda isn't leaking memory, your metrics are lying to you

DevOps & Infrastructure, Performance Engineering(engineering.taktile.com)view on HackerNews
AWS Lambdamemory leakglibcmallinfo2ONNX RuntimeDevOpsperformance engineering

Author: tlarkworthy

Date: 6/4/2026

Article Summary:
The article discusses an issue with AWS Lambda where the memory usage was increasing over time, leading to OOM (out of memory) errors, despite the expectation that reducing the cache size would help. The problem was eventually found to be caused by glibc's arena hoarding behavior, where memory is not freed after use, leading to a memory leak.