Django Channels Memory Leak on every message or connection

[cacosandon]

I'm having a memory leak in Django Channels using uvicorn.

Every "memory crash" is a restart/deploy 👇

This not just happens within my project, but also with the tutorial basic chat example.

Here is the repository with that minimal example and memory profiling: https://github.com/cacosandon/django-channels-memory-leak

This happens locally, in the server, with/without DEBUG, just by reconnecting or sending messages (in the example I've added large messages so you can notice the memory leak).

The memory is never released.. even if the user disconnects after.

I've proved it with memory-profiler and memray (both commands were added in the README so you can reproduce)

Dependencies:

Django==5.0.4
channels==4.0.0
channels-redis==4.2.0
uvicorn[standard]==0.29.0

# Profiling memory
memory-profiler==0.61.0
memray==1.12.0

I (think that) have really tried everything; deleting objects, manual garbage collection, etc. Nothing prevents the memory to increase and to never be released back. Any insights? 🙏

[carltongibson]

Does the same thing happen with other protocol servers, such as hypercorn and Daphne?

[cacosandon]

I've tested daphne and hypercorn alongside uvicorn. All three show a similar pattern of memory usage, increasing steadily up to around 160 MiB. Despite this, they continue to consume more memory indefinitely, as monitored by memory-profiler.

The interesting thing is, while uvicorn shows a continuous rise in memory usage on the memray graph, the graphs for daphne and hypercorn are flat at 80 MiB. This discrepancy makes it unclear which tool provides more reliable data.

Here are the commands I used for each:

• Uvicorn: memray run --force -o output.bin -m uvicorn core.asgi:application
• Daphne: python -m memray run -o output.bin --force ./manage.py runserver
• Hypercorn: memray run --force -o output.bin -m hypercorn core.asgi:application

[carltongibson]

And can you see from any of the tools, memray perhaps, which objects are consuming the memory?

(I'd expect a gc.collect() to help here TBH)

[carltongibson]

@cacosandon Also, can you try with the PubSub layer, and see if the results are different there? Thanks.

[cacosandon]

Sure! I'll try to find time today to prepare a report on memray --leaks for each protocol server and test the PubSub layer. I'll get back to you soon, thanks!

[cacosandon]

So I tried multiple combinations. All HTML reports from memray are here:
reports.zip

But below there are screenshots from them.

First, tried with Redis Channels (not PubSub) to get memory leaks.

With uvicorn

PYTHONMALLOC=malloc memray run --force -o output.bin -m uvicorn core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force --leaks

So, the leaks report include memory that was never released back, but I don't know how to interpret it correctly. Seems like AuthMiddleware was leaking but after removing it, the results are almost the same.

redis-channels-uvicorn-leaks.html

Here is the screenshot of the uvicorn + leaks without AuthMiddleware:

redis-channels-uvicorn-without-authmiddleware-leaks.html

Then tried with daphne

PYTHONMALLOC=malloc memray run --force -o output.bin -m daphne core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force --leaks

redis-channels-daphne-leaks.html

The interesting part is that hypercorn showed no memory leaks (or maybe memray is not working here(?))

PYTHONMALLOC=malloc memray run --force -o output.bin -m hypercorn core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force --leaks

redis-channels-hypercorn-leaks.html

---

Then, I tried with garbage collect for uvicorn and daphne. Same story for both.

memray run --force -o output.bin -m uvicorn core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force

redis-channels-uvicorn-gccollect.html

memray run --force -o output.bin -m daphne core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force

redis-channels-daphne-gccollect.html

---

And finally tried with PubSub for uvicorn and daphne

memray run --force -o output.bin -m uvicorn core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force

redis-pubsub-uvicorn.html

memray run --force -o output.bin -m daphne core.asgi:application
+
memray flamegraph output.bin --force

redis-pubsub-daphne.html

---

Just in case, I also removed all @profile above functions so the memory leaks were not affected by the memory-profiler library.

Hope all these reports help understanding the constant memory increase.

Right now I am trying to move my application to hypercorn so I can test it on staging, but websocket messages are empty 🤔 . If I manage to solve it, I'll post the results here!

[cacosandon]

I've made it to make hypercorn work!

For some reason the websocket messages that were bytes-only were sent as {"text": None, "bytes": ... } just in hypercorn so the function of AsyncWebsocketConsumer always called the text handler.

Added a PR for that: #2097

  async def websocket_receive(self, message):
      """
      Called when a WebSocket frame is received. Decodes it and passes it
      to receive().
      """
-     if "text" in message:
+     if "text" in message and message["text"] is not None:
          await self.receive(text_data=message["text"])
      else:
          await self.receive(bytes_data=message["bytes"])

Testing now in staging 🤞

[cacosandon]

Still there is a memory leak in my application with hypercorn 😕

It seems that memray just doesn't work with it, because memory-profiler does show a constant non-stop increase with any server protocol.

[carltongibson]

Hi @cacosandon

Looking at the uploaded report, for e.g. redis-pubsub-daphe, the memory usage rises and the stabilises:

The redis-channels-uvicorn-leaks report peaks at 168MB then falls to 151MB.

[cacosandon]

Hey @carltongibson, thank you for taking a look.

Yep, but if you zoom in redis-pubsub-daphe it just decelerates the memory increase (click on the graph). I think the first rise is just the correct memory usage, and then u see the memory leak.

On the other hand, redis-channels-uvicorn-leaks experiences memory drops at intervals due to the PYTHONMALLOC=malloc flag; however, the overall memory usage continues to increase. If you examine each drop, you'll notice that the memory level after each fall is higher than before, without stopping.

[cacosandon]

@carltongibson, do you have any clue about what's happening? Or what else can I try? I'm willing to try anything!

[carltongibson]

@cacosandon Given that you report it happening with the pub sub layer and different servers, not really. You need to identify where the leak is happening. Then it's possible to say something.

[cacosandon]

@carltongibson all my samples are from using RedisChannelLayer or RedisPubSubLayer, with uvicorn, daphne or hypercorn, with the tutorial example. My app has the problem too but I think it's a generalized problem.

Some things I've noticed:

• Memory increases constantly when there are large messages (>0.5MiB)
• Memory increases constantly when there are multiple connects/disconnects (every handshake adds memory)
• Memory leak is not present using InMemoryChannelLayer
• Using explicit del and gc.collect() decelerates the increase of memory.. but the leak is still present
• Creating large objects in Django Views does not leak the memory (every request kinds of clean up)

I don't know how nobody else is having this problem. Maybe they just don't send large messages 🤔

[carltongibson]

Hi @cacosandon — are you able to identify where the leak is happening? Alas, I haven't had time to dig into this further for you. Without that it's difficult to say too much.

If you can identify a more concrete issue, there's a good chance we can resolve it.

[cacosandon]

@carltongibson no :( that's actually the thing that I'm struggling on: finding the memory leak 😓

I really tried every tool to detect it, but nothing noticeable or strange in the reports..

[mitgr81]

I don't know how nobody else is having this problem. Maybe they just don't send large messages

I wouldn't assume that. 😉 I've been silently watching and hoping you find more than I did when I looked. We had some success changing servers from daphne to uvicorn. We're still seeing some leakiness, but have resolved to using tools to monitor memory and restart services.

Here are some other things I've watched:

• Daphne is slowly leaking memory via channels-redis ansible/awx#7720
• Memory leak? #1181
• https://github.com/yuriymironov96/django-channels-leak (from Django Channels memory leaks on opening new connections daphne#373)

[cacosandon]

@mitgr81 what tools do you use to monitor and restart? For now I would love to implement that.

Will take a look on those resources!

[mitgr81]

@mitgr81 what tools do you use to monitor and restart? For now I would love to implement that.

We're rocking a bespoke monitor for docker containers. It's pretty simple; essentially we label each container with a valid restart time and a memory limit (among other rules); and the "container keeper" looks for them.

[mitgr81]

@cacosandon - Just curious if you've had any more luck than I have on this.

[cacosandon]

Hey @mitgr81! No updates yet.

We're using garbage collection on every message or new connection. This has helped a bit, but the memory still slowly increases and hits the max in about a week. We usually deploy and restart automatically the machines 2-3 times a week, which temporarily fixes the issue.

I hope the Channels team can look into this to see if it's a general problem with memory leaks. cc @carltongibson

[domvie]

We're running into the same issue. Daphne process used up over 50gigs of RAM on our server before it crashed.

[jetale]

Hey @mitgr81! No updates yet.

We're using garbage collection on every message or new connection. This has helped a bit, but the memory still slowly increases and hits the max in about a week. We usually deploy and restart automatically the machines 2-3 times a week, which temporarily fixes the issue.

I hope the Channels team can look into this to see if it's a general problem with memory leaks. cc @carltongibson

Hi @cacosandon, Are you using uvicorn or daphne in production? or hypercorn?

[cacosandon]

Hey @mitgr81! No updates yet.

We're using garbage collection on every message or new connection. This has helped a bit, but the memory still slowly increases and hits the max in about a week. We usually deploy and restart automatically the machines 2-3 times a week, which temporarily fixes the issue.

I hope the Channels team can look into this to see if it's a general problem with memory leaks. cc @carltongibson

Hi @cacosandon, Are you using uvicorn or daphne in production? or hypercorn?

Hey! uvicorn for now.

[bigfootjon]

@cacosandon: What are the variables you haven't changed? It sounds like you've swapped everything out (including your application's business logic) and the problem still exists which is troubling.

Have you tried simplifying the code down until the problem doesn't exist? AIUI from this thread the channel-layer concept seems to be the cause, but have you tried to stub out the channel-layer code in various ways to see where the problem originates? (if it's not the channel-layer, then the same principle applies: just keep axing code until you've got the simplest program possible that still repros the problem)

(investing in a test harness that artificially generates problematic conditions might aid in discovering the problem by speeding up the testing cycle, if you haven't already done so)

[cacosandon]

Hey @bigfootjon!

Running this repository: https://github.com/cacosandon/django-channels-memory-leak, you'll notice the memory leaks.

If you remove the sending of large messages, then the problem disappears unless you open/close connections fast enough to make the memory go up again. It's literally the basic setup of Django Channels, so I don't know what else I should remove.

I think the next step is going deeper into Django Channels source code and start modifying things there. I don't have a lot of time now to do this, so we have mitigated it by monitoring and restarting our servers (for now).

[bigfootjon]

If you find some time to investigate I think removing code from channels is the right approach. If the memory charts aren’t doing it then the opposite (finding ways NOT to allocate memory) is the only path forward

[sevdog]

I tried to investigate this and in my tests I found an interesting hint: changing the "serializer" changes the memory footprint by a lot.

Since both RedisChannelLayer and RedisChannelLayer use msgpack I tried overriding the serialization in the first one with standardlib json and I got a very different memory profile:

With msgpack:

import json
import random
from channels_redis.core import RedisChannelLayer as _RedisChannelLayer


class RedisChannelLayer(_RedisChannelLayer):
    ### Serialization ###
    def serialize(self, message):
        """
        Serializes message to a byte string.
        """
        message = json.dumps(message).encode('utf-8')
        if self.crypter:
            message = self.crypter.encrypt(message)

        # As we use an sorted set to expire messages we need to guarantee uniqueness, with 12 bytes.
        random_prefix = random.getrandbits(8 * 12).to_bytes(12, "big")
        return random_prefix + message

    def deserialize(self, message):
        """
        Deserializes from a byte string.
        """
        # Removes the random prefix
        message = message[12:]

        if self.crypter:
            message = self.crypter.decrypt(message, self.expiry + 10)
        return json.loads(message.decode('utf-8'))

With JSON:

As you can see the memory in the JSON test return back to a "normal" level (there is still some memory which was not released, but much less than with msgpack).

I tested this on python 3.10 inside an alpine-docker container.

Also seems that there is a problem with msgpack and python 3.12: msgpack/msgpack-python#612

I would like to have more time to perform furhter tests and learn how to better use the memory profile, for the moment I hope that this may help someoneelse to find a solution.

[acu192]

Cross linking #1948 which is a long-standing known memory leak in channels.

[carltongibson]

Thanks @acu192. You're absolutely right. There's an unresolved chain of thought, and a likely fix sat there (for life reasons on my part I suppose.)

@cacosandon if you could test the linked PRs and feedback, that would help greatly.

[cacosandon]

Hey!

Yes, would love to help. Tried and raised some errors, surely because it's outdated and needs a rebase. Will ping him in the PR!

[carltongibson]

@cacosandon do note there's two related PRs. One for channels and one for channels-redis. You'll need to apply them both.

[cacosandon]

@carltongibson Already rebased both channels and channels-redis PRs. These are the updated dependencies:

Django==5.0.2
channels @ git+https://github.com/fosterseth/channels.git@clean_channels
channels-redis @ git+https://github.com/fosterseth/channels_redis.git@clean_channels
uvicorn[standard]==0.20.0
memory-profiler==0.61.0
memray==1.12.0

and these are the results for Uvicorn with PubSub:

It seems the problem persists. I believe @sevdog's investigation around the serializer is likely the root cause, given its generic nature (whether using PubSub or not, and regardless of uvicorn, daphne, or hypercorn, even with a minimal example).

I can test with other settings later. Let me know!

[carltongibson]

@cacosandon OK, thanks for trying it.

As to root cause, I still need to get a minimal reproduce nailed down here, but yes maybe...

We're getting closer to it I suppose 😅

[bigfootjon]

@cacosandon, if you have some spare cycles could you try switching to the json serializer that @sevdog whipped up? django/channels_redis#398

[cacosandon]

hey!

this is the test I'm running:

• send two messages, inside two different 'rooms'
• on every message receive, send another 500 heavy messages like this 👇

    async def receive(self, text_data):
        content = await self.decode_json(text_data)

        # Send message to room group
        await self.channel_layer.group_send(
            self.room_group_name, {"type": "chat.message", "content": content}
        )

        for i in range(500):
            # Create a struct of variable Mb from 1 to 5
            struct = bytearray(1024 * 1024 * random.randint(1, 5))
            message = bytes(struct)
            await self.channel_layer.group_send(
                self.room_group_name, {"type": "chat.binary", "message": message}
            )

            print(f"Sent message {i + 1} of 500")

            del struct
            gc.collect()

here is the repo: https://github.com/cacosandon/django-channels-memory-leak/blob/main/chat/consumers.py
here is a video explaining how to perform the test (see in 2x):

Screen.Recording.2024-09-22.at.12.59.41.1.mov

here are the results:

with original requirements.txt:

uvicorn + redis channels

uvicorn + pubsub redis channels

with django/channels_redis#398

uvicorn + redis channels

uvicorn + pubsub redis channels

seems like something improved! crazy how the memory went on a rollercoaster in the last one. 😅

[dogrocker]

hey!

this is the test I'm running:

• send two messages, inside two different 'rooms'
• on every message receive, send another 500 heavy messages like this 👇

    async def receive(self, text_data):
        content = await self.decode_json(text_data)

        # Send message to room group
        await self.channel_layer.group_send(
            self.room_group_name, {"type": "chat.message", "content": content}
        )

        for i in range(500):
            # Create a struct of variable Mb from 1 to 5
            struct = bytearray(1024 * 1024 * random.randint(1, 5))
            message = bytes(struct)
            await self.channel_layer.group_send(
                self.room_group_name, {"type": "chat.binary", "message": message}
            )

            print(f"Sent message {i + 1} of 500")

            del struct
            gc.collect()

here is the repo: https://github.com/cacosandon/django-channels-memory-leak/blob/main/chat/consumers.py here is a video explaining how to perform the test (see in 2x):

Screen.Recording.2024-09-22.at.12.59.41.1.mov
here are the results:

with original requirements.txt:

uvicorn + redis channels

### uvicorn + pubsub redis channels ## with [django/channels_redis#398](https://github.com/django/channels_redis/pull/398) ### uvicorn + redis channels ### uvicorn + pubsub redis channels seems like something improved! crazy how the memory went on a rollercoaster in the last one. 😅

"Hello! Do you mean to use 'pubsub redis' and set 'serializer_format': 'json' to fix the issue?"

[ceelian]

Hi, is this happening in a rare edge case only or does that mean that every project that uses django channels will end up with a memory leak?

I wanted to use channels for a new project but now I am unsure if that issue will apply to my project as well. Thx.

[carltongibson]

@ceelian we're still waiting for someone to fully diagnose it. The trouble with these things is they're very set up specific.

It seems to be an issue for folks pushing significant amounts of data through the channel layer. If you're using the channel layer for simple messaging it shouldn't be an issue. (If you have large data packages, you can always put them in a blob storage for collection, saving the channel layer just for notifications.)

Plenty of folks are Channels successfully.

[ceelian]

@carltongibson thank you very much for the quick response and the explanation.

[lesc6]

even if you have small messages you will face this problem with memory, it just make it more slower to raise limits

[ceelian]

@lesc6 that's concerning, how do you/should we manage this in production systems?