Summary

The memory consumption of the agent has not been fully optimized yet. Optimization of the memory footprint has been a frequent user ask.

Details

The memory consumption consists of:

• Direct memory consumption of the cilium-agent
• Peak memory allocation of the agent with delayed release of the Go runtime
• Maximum memory usage of all components running inside the Cilium pod at once, potentially exceeding the configured memory limit of the pod. (agent + health endpoints + Envoy + client invocations)
• eBPF map usage

Tasks

• Trace total memory consumpion on entire system
• Profile & reduce the agent memory consumption
• Profile & reduce the memory consumption of secondary components
• Profile the eBPF map memory consumption
  • Consider changing default sizes of maps
  • Consider resizing cilium_metrics eBPF map (currently 64K)
  • Research what looks to be an invalid global cilium_policy map (should be endpoint specific)
• Binary size reduction (Reduce the golang binary size #6099)
  • Reduce the binary size of cilium-cni
  • Remove need for go-bindata (Remove go-bindata #10075)