Question

CouchDB memory consumption rising over time

I’m running a CouchDB (2.3.1) on Ubuntu 16.04 with 1GB of memory. While my Node Server constantly consumes around 35MB, the CouchDB memory usage increases over time (see my Droplets Memory Graph).

Here you can find my running processes list.

Is this normal? What could I do to fix this?


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Moisey Uretsky
DigitalOcean Employee
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July 19, 2019
Accepted Answer

It is normal to see a database, including CouchDB increasing memory consumption over time. This is because as a database serves more requests it will cache more results. This way it can return the results faster.

You can usually set the caching limits on a database so that you can control the total amount of memory that it uses, but increasing memory consumption is a feature of every database and provides for very fast response times.

If you have additional RAM left over on your server it’s not an issue either, as it’s better to use the memory you have available and let the DB cache as many results as it can so that it reduces any load on the CPU.

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