Diagnostics from production Agents running on Kubernetes show:

• The elastic-agent process itself uses more memory than all its configured inputs combined.
• Within the elastic-agent process, more than 90% of memory use is in Kubernetes helpers. 70% of that is from elastic-agent-autodiscover and the other 20% is from helpers internal to elastic-agent.

We need to understand why the Kubernetes helpers are using so much memory, and find a way to mitigate it.

Definition of done

• Provide steps for a reproducible setup that can demonstrate the aforementioned memory usage with an Agent diagnostic
• Attach Agent diagnostic to this issue to use as a baseline, so we can compare against it when improvements are made
• Reduce memory use by Kubernetes helpers from 90% to TBD% (TBD, at the moment, until we've done more investigation)