Cap glibc malloc arenas to keep non-Go RSS bounded (closes #23)
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After the earlier memory work, SQLite's live heap is bounded but process
RSS still climbed about 70 MiB/min, nearly all anonymous and outside the
Go runtime and outside SQLite's own accounting, without any SQLITE_NOMEM.
The cause is glibc: the SQLite C library allocates and frees millions of
small page-cache chunks from many threads, and glibc keeps each arena's
freed chunks resident. With arenas uncapped it creates up to eight per
core, so on a large host RSS grows with the core count.

Set MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2 in the image to bound the retained memory. Writes
are already serialized, so the two-arena cap costs no throughput. Update
the README Memory section.

Model: opus-4-8
This commit was merged in pull request #24.
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-21 19:29:31 +02:00
parent 658aadbb81
commit 08f060045b
2 changed files with 19 additions and 1 deletions
+8
View File
@@ -83,6 +83,14 @@ ENV XDG_DATA_HOME=/var/lib
# XDG_DATA_HOME above.
ENV GOMEMLIMIT=1536MiB
# Cap glibc's malloc arenas. The SQLite C library allocates and frees millions
# of small page-cache chunks from many threads; glibc otherwise creates up to
# eight arenas per core (hundreds on a large host) and keeps each arena's freed
# chunks resident, so process RSS climbs far above SQLite's live heap and never
# comes back down. Two arenas keep that retained memory bounded; database writes
# are already serialized, so the lost allocator concurrency costs nothing here.
ENV MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2
# Expose HTTP port
EXPOSE 8080