RabbitMQ high memory consumption without any client activity
Article ID: 293156
Updated On:
Products
VMware RabbitMQ
Issue/Introduction
RabbitMQ has high memory consumption, without any client activity, and restarting the cluster resolves the issue.
Resolution
Some recent Linux distributions, such as ArchLinux, RHEL 9, and CentOS Stream 9, ship a recent version of systemd that sets the default open file handle limit is set to 1073741816 or about one billion. This is much higher than the default used by older distributions such as CentOS 8.
For a lot of software this doesn’t change anything. However, the Erlang runtime will allocate more memory upfront on systems with a very high limit. This leads to a high footprint of newly started RabbitMQ nodes without any data or meaningful client activity.
There are two ways to mitigate this problem:
1. Lower the file handle limit for the user that runs the node (usually named rabbitmq)
2. Set the ERL_MAX_PORTS environment variable to a lower value
References:
High Initial Memory Consumption of RabbitMQ Nodes on Centos Stream 9
Configuration Using Environment Variables
For a lot of software this doesn’t change anything. However, the Erlang runtime will allocate more memory upfront on systems with a very high limit. This leads to a high footprint of newly started RabbitMQ nodes without any data or meaningful client activity.
There are two ways to mitigate this problem:
1. Lower the file handle limit for the user that runs the node (usually named rabbitmq)
2. Set the ERL_MAX_PORTS environment variable to a lower value
References:
High Initial Memory Consumption of RabbitMQ Nodes on Centos Stream 9
Configuration Using Environment Variables
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