Reduce memory footprint of Netdata Agent

Help
,
1

Problem/Question

How can I reduce the memory footprint of Netdata Agent?

Relevant docs you followed/actions you took to solve the issue

Memory consumption

Environment/Browser/Agent’s version etc

VPS 1CPU / 1GB RAM
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
netdata v1.44.1

What I expected to happen

I checked netdata’s memory consumption with Netdata monitoring and metric " Resources utilization of systemd services" shows ~200MB (for netdata).

I checked /etc/netdata/netdata.conf and this config includes only few parameters:

[global]
    run as user = netdata

    # default storage size - increase for longer data retention
    page cache size = 32
    dbengine multihost disk space = 256

After reading further documentation I wonder why there’s no section db in the configuration file.

Can you please advise?

THX

2

That is memory usage of all Netdata’s components and I believe it includes shared memory. You can see the actual memory usage in the “Applications” section “memory” subsection, check the first chart - “Apps memory usage without shared”.

There you can find Netdata and its data collection plugins - processes with .plugin suffix:

Screenshot 2024-01-06 at 01.14.49
Screenshot 2024-01-06 at 01.14.493058×1142 437 KB

You can disable plugins in netdata.conf, check the [plugins] section.

You can decrease memory usage of Netdata process by changing in netdata.conf

[db]
    dbengine page type = gorilla

Restart Netdata to apply changes.

3

This metric shows ~99MB for netdata.

I wonder why I should switch to dbengine page type = gorilla.

I’m running a mail server (dovecot, postfix, spamd) and think it makes sense to limit metrics for relevant application(s) running.

4

See “Gorilla compression beta” in v1.44.0 highlights. It is still beta but worth trying.

Also, if you see that ebpf.plugin uses a lot of (assuming 50-60 is a lot in your case) - disable it.

5

Actually I can’t see any data for ebpf.plugin in metric "Apps memory usage without shared”.