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Memory Attack Use Cases

Technical Use Cases​

Prepare for memory leaks and out of memory (OOM) errors​

Memory leaks happen when applications gradually consume more memory than they release. Over time, this can consume enough memory to cause system instability, crashes, and swapping (also known as paging) which can significantly impact application performance and availability. This can also trigger out of memory (OOM) errors, where the system has no available memory left to allocate and must start terminating processes.

Test memory-intensive workloads​

Some workloads are inherently memory-hungry, such as in-memory caches, databases, and machine learning models. Using Memory attacks lets you simulate the impact these workloads would have on your systems before you deploy them, helping you with capacity planning and right-sizing your infrastructure.

Prepare for a cloud migration​

Like CPU attacks, memory attacks can help you prepare for cloud migrations by simulating noisy neighbors, setting and validating autoscaling thresholds, validating the configuration of resource quotas (such as cgroups and Kubernetes resource limits), and validating alerting thresholds. This way, you can test your workloads under cloud-like conditions before migrating them.

Business Initiatives Aligned with Memory Attacks​

Prepare for peak traffic events​

Like CPU, memory usage can change in response to increased demand. Performing memory attacks lets teams simulate these conditions in advance of high traffic events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday so that you can better prepare.

Reduce operating expenses​

Right-sizing memory capacity can save significantly on infrastructure costs, especially in the cloud. Memory attacks allow teams to validate the stability of their applications under changing memory conditions, allowing for better capacity planning and potential cost savings.

Before starting a cloud migration, use CPU attacks to simulate cloud conditions such as noisy neighbors on shared infrastructure, or instances with reduced CPU capacity. This will help prevent unexpected issues from arising once you start the migration process.