Introduction
One of the most misleading situations in Kubernetes is when a pod keeps restarting because of an OOMKilled event while CPU utilization looks perfectly healthy.
I have seen engineers spend hours investigating CPU throttling, autoscaling, node capacity, and even networking, only to discover later that memory was the actual problem.
The reality is that Kubernetes treats CPU and memory very differently. CPU can be throttled. Memory cannot. Once memory is exhausted, Kubernetes has no choice but to terminate the container.
Understanding why this happens is critical for running production workloads reliably.
