How to Diagnose a Silent Memory Leak

Linux Server Admin with Fexingo: Sysadmin, Bash, and Server Engineering · May 22, 2026 · 10m · transcript

Memory leaks are the ghosts of server administration: invisible until your OOM killer reaps a production process at 3 a.m. In this episode, Lucas and Luna walk through a real case from a mid-sized ad-tech company where a 12-line Node.js script silently consumed 32 GB over six days. They explain how to spot the early signs using /proc/meminfo, why RSS vs. USS matters, and the one tool (valgrind's memcheck) that catches heap allocations your monitoring dashboard misses. By the end, you'll know exactly which three metrics to graph and what a slow-shrinking 'available' memory curve actually looks…