0Pricing
Production Debugging & Incident Response Playbook · Lesson

Debugging Memory Leaks and GC Pressure in Production

Diagnose creeping memory growth, garbage collection pauses, and out-of-memory crashes in live services using heap analysis and allocation profiling.

Symptoms of a Memory Problem

Memory issues rarely announce themselves cleanly. Watch for these patterns:

  • Slowly rising RSS that never drops
  • Increasing latency from longer GC pauses
  • Periodic OOM kills and restarts

This lesson covers diagnosing them in production.

Leak vs Bloat vs Churn

Distinguish three failure modes:

  • Leak: memory grows unbounded and is never freed
  • Bloat: high but stable usage from large caches
  • Churn: rapid allocate/free cycles stressing the GC

Each needs a different fix.

All lessons in this course

  1. Identifying Performance Bottlenecks
  2. Advanced System and Application Profiling
  3. Database Performance Debugging Strategies
  4. Debugging Memory Leaks and GC Pressure in Production
← Back to Production Debugging & Incident Response Playbook