Google: Detect Memory Leak by Monitoring RSS — DevOps Interview Q&A (2026)

Detect Memory Leak by Monitoring RSS

Beginner Mode

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Scenario

One of your long-running Node.Js services (process name node) has been slowing down over several hours of uptime. CPU usage is normal, disk I/O is normal, but the server is gradually running out of memory.

Task

Identify if any process is leaking memory and kill that process.

Step 1: Identify the suspect process by name

pgrep -l node

This shows all processes with "node" in the name along with their PIDs.

Look at the RSS column (in KB) to see current memory usage.

Step 2: Test the output format without headers

ps -p <process id> -o pid,rss,comm

Step 3: Kill the leaking process

sudo kill <process id>

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