Gremlin Scenario: Linux memory scalability

How it works

How this Scenario works

This Scenario progressively consumes memory on your Linux hosts in three stages: 50%, 75%, and 90%. This simulates memory pressure from traffic spikes, memory leaks, or under-provisioned instances.

Use cases

Why run this Scenario?

Identify memory leaks or poor garbage collection in applications running on Linux hosts.
Test how Linux OOM Killer behavior affects your services under extreme memory pressure.
Verify that monitoring and alerting triggers before memory exhaustion on Linux infrastructure.
Optimize Linux host memory provisioning based on real memory pressure behavior to balance cost and performance.

Result

What to expect when you run it

If memory usage spikes to 90% on a Linux host, the application continues to function without performance degradation for at least 5 minutes.

Keep going

More Scenarios to try

Kubernetes packet loss

Ensure your Kubernetes systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate liveness/readiness probe and load balancer behavior.

Container packet loss

Ensure your containerized systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.

Windows packet loss

Ensure your Windows systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.

Linux memory scalability