# Agent instances, memory leaking on fresh start

**URL:** <https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235>\
**Category:** OpenCore\
**Tags:** opencore\
**Created:** [February 6, 2026, 11:56am UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235 "2026-02-06T11:56:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/user_avatar/discourse.openiap.io/anono_nono/32/2098_2.png) [@Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/Anono_Nono)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2026, 11:56am UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/1 "2026-02-06T11:56:46Z")

</div>

Hi Allan,

I have a self-hosted instance, and since yesterday, I keep getting some memory leaks on any agent instance I set up. Doesn’t matter if nodered, or nodeagent. It just shoots up the ram, and then kills itself and restarts.

It shoots up about +100MB ram per second, in about 5 seconds after an image instance is started.

Any idea where to start investigations?

It seems like a handshake issue between opencore and the image instance itself. But don’t know where to look for these logs. The docker logs on the images don’t tell much either.

TY

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/user_avatar/discourse.openiap.io/anono_nono/32/2098_2.png) [@Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/Anono_Nono)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2026, 1:17pm UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/2 "2026-02-06T13:17:10Z")

</div>

docker host machine is a windows box. on a linux box, everything works fine. reinstalled docker on that windows, same thing. can’t really put a fingre on it.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/user_avatar/discourse.openiap.io/anono_nono/32/2098_2.png) [@Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/Anono_Nono)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2026, 2:51pm UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/3 "2026-02-06T14:51:39Z")

</div>

completely fine on linux. windows (wsl) spin up is bugged. had to create a VM on windows and run it this way, but it is not ideal since docker is supposed to just replace the need of an entire VM.

solution: don’t use windows 🙂

it ran completely fine for 6 months, don’t know if that windows box did an automatic update or something that broke it… no idea

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Allan\_Zimmermann](https://discourse.openiap.io/user_avatar/discourse.openiap.io/allan_zimmermann/32/12_2.png) [@Allan\_Zimmermann](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/Allan_Zimmermann)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2026, 7:58am UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/4 "2026-02-07T07:58:44Z")

</div>

First time i heard about issues with OpenCore on windows.  
But glad you found a solution.

Did it crash even when it was “empty”, with no packages scheduled ?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/user_avatar/discourse.openiap.io/anono_nono/32/2098_2.png) [@Anono\_Nono](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/Anono_Nono)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2026, 9:15am UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/5 "2026-02-07T09:15:15Z")

</div>

The plain openiap/noderedagent instance boots up, eats tons of RAM, the container implodes, and then it restarts. Same with nodeagent, except it crashed at about +7GB.

In the attached screenshot, you can see nodered (lively-bush-ce82) hitting 1.796GB only 15 seconds after boot. The CPU spikes and stays at +250%. It eventually climbs to +4GB (in total takes about 40 seconds), which kills the instance and triggers a restart.

 ![image](https://discourse.openiap.io/uploads/default/original/2X/1/187c91861cdb8dae11fa002461b4e271418033a4.png)

I spent the entire day trying to isolate the source. Logs show absolutely nothing; they look normal across the api, mongo, rabbit, and traefik containers. I’m not sure if there’s a trace or debug flag I haven’t found to show more info.

The same docker-compose on Linux sits nicely at 200MB RAM idle. My A/B testing shows that on a Linux VM on the same Windows host, it works fine - it only fails in Windows Docker.

To be entirely sure it’s the Windows docker engine, I probably need to try another windows machine, to make sure this is not something specific to that windows machine I’m running on

```auto
C:\Users\Office>wsl --version
WSL version: 2.6.3.0
Kernel version: 6.6.87.2-1
WSLg version: 1.0.71
MSRDC version: 1.2.6353
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.26100.1-240331-1435.ge-release
Windows version: 10.0.26200.7705

```

Thing is, it worked fine for 6+ months, without any intervention. And suddenly we noticed crazy RAM usage 🤷‍♂️

And here I tried to memory dump such an instance, but it would kill itself before the snapshot can be saved and inspected. You can see 8GB memory used here

 ![image](https://discourse.openiap.io/uploads/default/original/2X/4/4de3a5f3e6f77ce78382f0201f1e3304dfd63d8d.png)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://discourse.openiap.io/uploads/default/original/2X/a/a1ca7b164ac9a826839704d9ac82c7b5e6bcf557.png) [@system](https://discourse.openiap.io/u/system)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2026, 9:15am UTC](https://discourse.openiap.io/t/agent-instances-memory-leaking-on-fresh-start/3235/6 "2026-02-10T09:15:28Z")

</div>

Closed on February 10, 2026, 9:15am UTC

This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.