To demonstrate the kubelet's eviction behaviour, I am trying to deploy a Kubernetes workload that will consume memory to the point that the kubelet evicts all BestEffort Pods due to memory pressure but does not kill my workload (or at least not before the BestEffort Pods).

My best attempt is below. It writes to two tmpfs volumes (since, by default, the limit of a tmpfs volume is half of the Node's total memory). The 100 comes from the fact that --eviction-hard=memory.available<100Mi is set on the kubelet:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: fallocate
  namespace: developer
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: fallocate
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: fallocate
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: alpine
        image: alpine
        command:
        - /bin/sh
        - -c
        - |
          count=1
          while true
          do          

            AVAILABLE_DISK_KB=$(df /cache-1 | grep /cache-1 | awk '{print $4}')
            AVAILABLE_DISK_MB=$(( $AVAILABLE_DISK_KB / 1000 ))
            AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB=$(free -m | grep Mem | awk '{print $4}')
            MINIMUM=$(( $AVAILABLE_DISK_MB > $AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB ?  $AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB : $AVAILABLE_DISK_MB ))
            fallocate -l $(( $MINIMUM - 100 ))MB /cache-1/$count

            AVAILABLE_DISK_KB=$(df /cache-2 | grep /cache-2 | awk '{print $4}')
            AVAILABLE_DISK_MB=$(( $AVAILABLE_DISK_KB / 1000 ))
            AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB=$(free -m | grep Mem | awk '{print $4}')
            MINIMUM=$(( $AVAILABLE_DISK_MB > $AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB ?  $AVAILABLE_MEMORY_MB : $AVAILABLE_DISK_MB ))
            fallocate -l $(( $MINIMUM - 100 ))MB /cache-2/$count            

            count=$(( $count+1 ))
            sleep 1

          done
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: 2Gi
            cpu: 100m
          limits:
            cpu: 100m
        volumeMounts:
        - name: cache-1
          mountPath: /cache-1
        - name: cache-2
          mountPath: /cache-2
      volumes:
      - name: cache-1
        emptyDir:
          medium: Memory
      - name: cache-2
        emptyDir:
          medium: Memory

The intention of this script is to use up memory to the point that Node memory usage is in the hard eviction threshhold boundary to cause the kubelet to start to evict. It evicts some BestEfforts Pods, but in most cases the workload is killed before all BestEffort Pods are evicted. Is there a better way of doing this?

I am running on GKE with cluster version 1.9.3-gke.0.

EDIT:

I also tried using simmemleak:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: simmemleak
  namespace: developer
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: simmemleak
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: simmemleak
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: simmemleak
        image: saadali/simmemleak
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: 1Gi
            cpu: 1m
          limits:
            cpu: 1m

But this workload keeps dying before any evictions. I think the issue is that it is being killed by the kernel before the kubelet has time to react.