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Please provide as much information as possible. At least, this should include a description of your issue and steps to reproduce the problem. If possible please provide a summary of what steps or workarounds you have already tried, and any docs or articles you found (un)helpful.

Problem you have encountered: By using the “Cloud Logging agent” [1] (with the google-fluentd version 1.9.2) [2], and the systemd plugin [fluent-plugin-systemd 1.0.5] [3], you may see a steady increase in the [Google Fluentd Logging Agent memory usage] in your instance. This steady increase could be in the hundreds of MiB per week.

What you expected to happen: The memory usage of the “Cloud Logging agent” should have a relatively stable value (considering that there are no increases in the volume of logs).

Steps to reproduce: Review the memory usage (time series) of the [Google Fluentd Logging Agent] in the VM instance.

Other information (workarounds you have tried, documentation consulted, etc):

• The Cloud Logging Product Engineering Team is aware of the issue, and they are working on the long term fix. Anyway, this long term fix is blocked by the [fluentd] issue #3401 [4]. Due to this, it is not possible to define an estimated ETA yet.

[Workarounds]

1. Restart the agent periodically (for example, every one or two weeks) [5]:

- Run the following command on your instance:

sudo service google-fluentd restart

2. The Product Engineering Team has explained that the Logging agent is being replaced by the “Ops agent” [6], and several improvements of resource usage (including the memory one) are available there. If possible, please consider using the “Ops agent” [7] instead.

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Reference:

[1] https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/agent/logging

[2] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-fluentd/releases/tag/1.9.2

[3] https://github.com/fluent-plugin-systemd/fluent-plugin-systemd

[4] https://github.com/fluent/fluentd/issues/3401

[5] https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/agent/logging/installation#restart

[6] https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/agent

[7] https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/agent/ops-agent