Open Source Summit North America 2025

Why do some requests take so much longer than others? A major contributor, memory-related contention between containers, was shown to increase latency by 4-13x. It can be triggered by garbage collection, and existing observability cannot even detect it! Current collectors just show high CPU utilization, and the standard mitigation is to scale out and run at low utilization: expensive, and does not solve the response time problem.

We set out to build a new detector, but found that measuring every few seconds (current practice for collectors) is inadequate. Servers quickly jump between intense resource competition and under-utilization, so averaging over seconds does not show any contention. We needed measurements at millisecond frequency.

This session first examines real-world patterns that trigger interference and surveys methods for detecting memory interference, including findings from Google, Alibaba, and Meta's production environments. We'll then discuss the design of the OSS collector, and how it combines CPU performance counters, eBPF and high-resolution timers to identify noisy neighbors. We close with future directions and opportunities to get involved.