Dev Tools · 1h ago
Debugging a phantom memory spike reveals a crash-looping rsyslog
A 130 MB memory spike on four lab routers, visible in Grafana but absent from logs, traced to a host-level event. Investigation uncovered rsyslog crash-looping 2.4 million times due to a socket conflict with systemd. The root cause was a disabled restart limiter, causing a 100ms restart cycle that went unnoticed for years.
Meridian48 take
The story is a neat case study in observability gaps, but its practical impact is limited to niche containerized network labs.
observabilitydebugging