TL;DR How do I manage container memory in Resin/Balena?
What sort of memory management features can I tap into for Resin to ensure a container doesn’t eat up the memory and crash a device? I have an application that increases in RAM usage the longer it goes, and I’d like the ability to set a RAM usage cap for the supervisor to kill and restart the container after it gets to a certain point. Fixing the application isn’t an option, as the RAM usage isn’t a leak but rather an expected mode of operating - it loads logs into memory for viewing and clears them on a restart.
I’ve tried the following:
- Docker Healthcheck feature in the Dockerfile so the container knows when to restart itself, but I’m not sure Balena watches that feature. See an example HEALTHCHECK in the Dockerfile at https://github.com/realeyes-media/mitmproxy-rpi3/blob/master/Dockerfile.
- I would set the memory maximum at the Docker-compose level, but the application needs to know when to exit before it crashes from lack of memory.
So far the container runs and increases in memory until Balena can’t address memory any more, which crashes Balena and takes the device out of operation for 5 min or so while it recovers. Is there something I can use to signal Balena to restart a container at a certain level of RAM usage?