The author discusses the challenges and surprises faced while upgrading the operating system in a production environment. They highlight the increase in memory consumption after upgrading to a higher operating system version and investigate potential causes such as memory leaks and the underlying memory allocator. The author shares their attempts to resolve the issue, including calling the garbage collector regularly and using a dedicated allocator. They also discuss potential bugs and factors contributing to the excessive memory usage. The author concludes by advising to consider the potential impacts and implement careful procedures when upgrading operating systems and libraries.
https://www.algolia.com/blog/engineering/when-allocators-are-hoarding-your-precious-memory/