To debug the memory usage issue, I've gone through the following steps.

[root@rnqmax401 ~]# date

Thu Jan 7 08:41:52 PST 2021

[root@rnqmax401 ~]#

Using top I've captured the PID that is taking up all the memory.

top - 07:57:24 up 2 days, 9:33, 1 user, load average: 0.19, 0.14, 0.11

Tasks: 156 total, 1 running, 155 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

%Cpu(s): 0.9 us, 0.8 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.3 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st

KiB Mem : 98.2/16247560 [|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ]

KiB Swap: 54.2/4194300 [|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ]

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

54343 maxscale 20 0 15.7g 14.0g 376 S 0.7 90.7 14:05.80 maxscale

Check which process is running with PID 54343. It's the systemctl MaxScale service.

[root@rnqmax401 ~]# ps -ef | grep 54343

root 43013 68600 0 08:01 pts/2 00:00:00 grep --color=auto 54343

maxscale 54343 1 0 Jan05 ? 00:14:07 /usr/bin/maxscale

[root@rnqmax401 ~]#

Check for the admin port for that MaxScale instance. It is 6111.

[root@rnqmax401 ~]# grep port /etc/maxscale.cnf

admin_port = 8991

port = 3111

port = 3111

port = 3111

port = 6111

port = 3111

#port=4442

port = 3111

port = 3111

port = 3111

port = 9994

# These listeners represent the ports the

[root@rnqmax401 ~]#

Before I started this debugging, I've redirected the application connections through a different MaxScale server. As you can see below, there are no active connections while I collected these stats. However, the memory allocated to MaxScale was not released back to the OS. This was captured on Thu Jan 7 08:41:52 PST 2021.

[root@rnqmax401 ~]# maxadmin -pmariadb -P6111 list servers

Servers.

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

Server | Address | Port | Connections | Status

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

server1 | 10.142.108.141 | 3111 | 0 | Master, Synced, Running

server2 | 10.142.108.142 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

server3 | 10.142.108.143 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

server1AD | 10.142.108.141 | 3111 | 0 | Master, Synced, Running

server2AD | 10.142.108.142 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

server3AD | 10.142.108.143 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

[root@rnqmax401 ~]#

MaxScale usage at Tue Jan 5 16:17:49 PST 2021, this was captured before this debug test.

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

Server | Address | Port | Connections | Status

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

server1 | 10.142.108.141 | 3111 | 966 | Master, Synced, Running

server2 | 10.142.108.142 | 3111 | 966 | Slave, Synced, Running

server3 | 10.142.108.143 | 3111 | 966 | Slave, Synced, Running

server1AD | 10.142.108.141 | 3111 | 0 | Master, Synced, Running

server2AD | 10.142.108.142 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

server3AD | 10.142.108.143 | 3111 | 0 | Slave, Synced, Running

-------------------+-----------------+-------+-------------+--------------------

I've restarted the MaxScale on 2021-01-05 15:02:06 and it was having low usage until Tue Jan 5 16:00:35 PST 2021. Between 16:00 and 16:04, the RAM usage went up from 890 MB to 15327 MB.