Yeah, it mostly happens when you have a server which runs an abnormally large task or payload, causes the heap to grow, and does it in a way that Go can't release the memory back to the OS due to heap fragmentation.

I haven't looked at this for a while but I believe it's still an issue.

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/2007 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18896 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/14045