---
title: "2025-03-27 - Memory Leak in Service in inventory-api"
date: 2025-03-27
severity: P2
services: [inventory-api, notification-service, billing-api, order-service]
tags: [rca, p2, application]
status: resolved
duration_minutes: 68
author: Platform Engineering
---
# 2025-03-27 - Memory Leak in Service in inventory-api
## Summary
On 2025-03-27, the inventory-api service experienced a memory leak in service. The incident lasted approximately 68 minutes and affected 3137 users and 4 dependent services.
## Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event |
|------------|-------|
| 16:14 | Monitoring alert triggered |
| 16:16 | On-call engineer paged |
| 16:19 | Initial investigation started |
| 16:24 | Root cause identified |
| 16:54 | Mitigation applied |
| 17:08 | Service recovery observed |
| 17:22 | Incident resolved |
## Root Cause
The incident was caused by memory leak in service in the inventory-api service.
Investigation revealed multiple contributing factors:
1. Recent code changes introduced a regression
2. Test coverage did not include edge cases
3. Monitoring gaps delayed detection
## Impact
- Service degradation: 88% of requests affected
- Error rate spike: 42% (baseline: <1%)
- Latency increase: p99 went from 362ms to 7176ms
### Affected Services
- inventory-api
- notification-service
- billing-api
- order-service
### Customer Impact
- 4215 customer-facing errors
- 38 support tickets created
- Estimated revenue impact: $12658
## Resolution
1. Deployed hotfix to address the immediate issue
2. Added regression tests for the affected code path
3. Implemented additional monitoring and alerting
4. Updated runbook with troubleshooting steps
## Lessons Learned
### What Went Well
- Alert fired within 3 minutes of incident start
- On-call response was quick (8 minutes)
- Cross-team collaboration was effective
- Communication to stakeholders was timely
### What Could Be Improved
- Need better runbooks for application issues
- Monitoring coverage gaps identified
- Load testing should cover this scenario
- Need automated rollback for faster recovery
## Action Items
| Priority | Action | Owner | Due Date |
|----------|--------|-------|----------|
| P1 | Implement monitoring for memory leak in service | DevOps | 2025-04-03 |
| P2 | Update runbook | Database Team | 2025-04-10 |
| P2 | Add load test scenario | SRE | 2025-04-17 |
| P3 | Review similar services | Platform Engineering | 2025-04-26 |
## Related Incidents
- [[2025-03-27-previous-incident|Previous application incident]]
- [[runbook-inventory-api|inventory-api Runbook]]
- [[architecture-application|Application Architecture]]
---
*RCA prepared by Platform Engineering on 2025-03-29*
