How a 22-Minute Redis Blip Ate 18 GB of RAM

A production memory-leak postmortem: two well-behaved libraries, one pathological interaction, and 50...

giovedì 9 luglio 2026 New tab

1,975 words~9 min read

A production memory-leak postmortem: two well-behaved libraries, one pathological interaction, and 50 million tiny objects the garbage collector was never allowed to free.

3:36 AM

The email from Railway arrived at 3:36 AM CDT on July 2nd:

Deploy Crashed!

Uh oh. Your deployment for taskqueue crashed within the staging environment.

How a 22-Minute Redis Blip Ate 18 GB of RAM

How a 22-Minute Redis Blip Ate 18 GB of RAM

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