I have a Kubernetes Pod that has

• Requested Memory of 1500Mb
• Memory Limit of 2048Mb

I have 2 containers running inside this pod, one is the actual application (heavy Java app) and a lightweight log shipper.

The pod consistently reports a usage of 1.9-2Gb of memory usage. Because of this, the deployment is scaled (an autoscaling configuration is set which scales pods if memory consumption > 80%), naturally resulting in more pods and more costs

Yellow Line represents application memory usage

However, on deeper investigation, this is what I found.

On execing inside the application container, I ran the top command, and it reports a total of 16431508 KiB or roughly 16Gb of memory available, which is the memory available on the Machine.

There are 3 processes running inside the application container, out of which the root process (application) takes 5.9% of memory, which roughly comes out to 0.92Gb.

The log-shipper simply takes 6Mb of memory.

Now, what I don't understand is WHY my pod consistently reports such high usage metrics. Am I missing something ? We're incurring significant costs due to the unintended auto-scaling and would like to fix the same.