Kibana memory consumption growing linearly until it crashes

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

Hi there! I have an issue with a simple Elastic / Kibana deployment on OpenShift. Even with no data being ingested in Elastic and virtually no users (just me testing), Kibana’s memory consumption grows linearly until the container is OOM Killed. My configuration is quite minimalist and I use the official containers version 9.1.4. I have one Elastic pod and one Kibana pod.

This is what I tried so far:

  • Give the container more memory. I tried from 2 GiB up to 6 GiB but it just keeps taking up memory until it crashes, it never seems to stop.
  • Set NODE_OPTIONS with --max-old-space-size=1024, also tried 2048, 512.
  • Disabled some plugins and features:
telemetry.enabled: false
xpack.reporting.enabled: false
xpack.canvas.enabled: false
xpack.fleet.enabled: false
xpack.indicesMetadata.enabled: false
xpack.screenshotting.enabled: false

The logs don’t show anything that I find interesting.

Using the /api/status endpoint, I can see that the heap usage is constant, but resident_set_size_in_bytes keeps growing very fast.

λ oc exec -it deploy/kibana -- curl -k https://localhost:5601/api/status -k |jq .metrics.process.memory; date
{
  "heap": {
    "total_in_bytes": 396181504,
    "used_in_bytes": 379005328,
    "size_limit": 562036736
  },
  "resident_set_size_in_bytes": 706420736,
  "array_buffers_in_bytes": 492831,
  "external_in_bytes": 4514730
}
Mon Nov 24 13:38:06     2025
λ oc exec -it deploy/kibana -- curl -k https://localhost:5601/api/status -k |jq .metrics.process.memory; date
{
  "heap": {
    "total_in_bytes": 408502272,
    "used_in_bytes": 388229616,
    "size_limit": 562036736
  },
  "resident_set_size_in_bytes": 808656896,
  "array_buffers_in_bytes": 566169,
  "external_in_bytes": 4588012
}
Mon Nov 24 13:45:15     2025
λ oc exec -it deploy/kibana -- curl -k https://localhost:5601/api/status -k |jq .metrics.process.memory; date
{
  "heap": {
    "total_in_bytes": 413745152,
    "used_in_bytes": 397290256,
    "size_limit": 562036736
  },
  "resident_set_size_in_bytes": 901521408,
  "array_buffers_in_bytes": 638061,
  "external_in_bytes": 4659680
}
Mon Nov 24 13:52:15     2025
λ oc exec -it deploy/kibana -- curl -k https://localhost:5601/api/status -k |jq .metrics.process.memory; date
{
  "heap": {
    "total_in_bytes": 447463424,
    "used_in_bytes": 430677584,
    "size_limit": 562036736
  },
  "resident_set_size_in_bytes": 1174245376,
  "array_buffers_in_bytes": 846778,
  "external_in_bytes": 4868845
}
Mon Nov 24 14:11:28     2025

I would appreciate any pointers towards investigating the root cause of this issue.

Cheers,

Fabio