Need to understand memory consumption of istio-proxy container

[anand_gt]

We were using 1.8.2 istio in which we observed high memory consumption from istio-proxy sidecar rather that application container which is taking very less memory compared to sidecar. I tried applying Sidecar resource in order to limit its metadata, but it didn’t help. Then I probably read about memory leak in that version so I upgraded istio to 1.10.6. Still the issue continues. So wanted to understand how istio-proxy sidecar consumes memory usually in order to find the root cause.
I’ve attached heap profile information with this post.

As of now this istio-proxy container is consuming more than 1GB memory.

Note: I’ve also configured few envoy filters to capture url and upstream_address in the proxy.

Kindly analyze the heap profile output and let me know what are the reasons for memory consumption in istio-proxy container. As stated in documentation istio-proxy can consume 90MB of memory for metadata, also as its not buffering any traffic, it will not consume memory for given traffic.

[sergiomacedo]

This probably is linked to the number of services you have exposed on the mesh. I learned last week, on one of solo.io’s workshop, that using the Sidecar object to restrict the services visibility can help reduce the memory usage.

Try look at that and see if it applies to your scenario.

I hope this helps.