---
title: "2025-08-08 - Memory Leak in Service in analytics-pipeline"
date: 2025-08-08
severity: P2
services: [analytics-pipeline, search-api, auth-service]
tags: [rca, p2, application]
status: resolved
duration_minutes: 81
author: Infrastructure
---
# 2025-08-08 - Memory Leak in Service in analytics-pipeline
## Summary
On 2025-08-08, the analytics-pipeline service experienced a memory leak in service. The incident lasted approximately 81 minutes and affected 9759 users and 3 dependent services.
## Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event |
|------------|-------|
| 12:13 | Monitoring alert triggered |
| 12:15 | On-call engineer paged |
| 12:18 | Initial investigation started |
| 12:23 | Root cause identified |
| 13:01 | Mitigation applied |
| 13:17 | Service recovery observed |
| 13:34 | Incident resolved |
## Root Cause
The incident was caused by memory leak in service in the analytics-pipeline 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: 100% of requests affected
- Error rate spike: 11% (baseline: <1%)
- Latency increase: p99 went from 414ms to 2628ms
### Affected Services
- analytics-pipeline
- search-api
- auth-service
### Customer Impact
- 3788 customer-facing errors
- 31 support tickets created
- Estimated revenue impact: $19522
## 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 5 minutes of incident start
- On-call response was quick (6 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 | Infrastructure | 2025-08-15 |
| P2 | Update runbook | Platform Engineering | 2025-08-22 |
| P2 | Add load test scenario | Database Team | 2025-08-29 |
| P3 | Review similar services | Database Team | 2025-09-07 |
## Related Incidents
- [[2025-08-08-previous-incident|Previous application incident]]
- [[runbook-analytics-pipeline|analytics-pipeline Runbook]]
- [[architecture-application|Application Architecture]]
---
*RCA prepared by Infrastructure on 2025-08-13*
