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tsdb: clear pooled objects before returning to sync.Pool#17895

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aknuds1 merged 1 commit into
prometheus:mainfrom
aknuds1:fix/pool-clearing
Mar 17, 2026
Merged

tsdb: clear pooled objects before returning to sync.Pool#17895
aknuds1 merged 1 commit into
prometheus:mainfrom
aknuds1:fix/pool-clearing

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@aknuds1

@aknuds1 aknuds1 commented Jan 20, 2026

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Summary

Clear WAL replay pool objects before Put() to avoid retaining references to Labels, Histograms, and other data that could prevent garbage collection. Follow-up to #17879.

The following pools now properly clear their contents before returning objects:

tsdb/head_wal.go (loadWAL):

  • wlReplaySeriesPool: clear Labels field
  • wlReplaytStonesPool: clear intervals
  • wlReplayExemplarsPool: clear Labels field
  • wlReplayHistogramsPool: clear histogram pointers
  • wlReplayFloatHistogramsPool: clear float histogram pointers
  • wlReplayMetadataPool: clear metadata strings

tsdb/head_wal.go (loadWBL):

  • wlReplayHistogramsPool: clear histogram pointers
  • wlReplayFloatHistogramsPool: clear float histogram pointers

tsdb/agent/db.go (loadWAL):

  • walReplaySeriesPool: clear Labels field
  • walReplayHistogramsPool: clear histogram pointers
  • walReplayFloatHistogramsPool: clear float histogram pointers

Which issue(s) does the PR fix:

N/A - preventive fix for potential memory retention issues.

Does this PR introduce a user-facing change?

[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix memory leaks in buffer pools by clearing reference fields before returning buffers to pools

Test plan

  • Existing tests pass with go test -race ./tsdb/...
  • Build succeeds

@beorn7 beorn7 left a comment

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@bboreham might want to have a look, too.

@aknuds1
aknuds1 requested a review from a team as a code owner January 27, 2026 16:13
Clear WAL replay pool objects before Put() to avoid retaining references
to Labels, Histograms, and other data that could prevent garbage
collection.

The following pools now properly clear their contents:
- wlReplaySeriesPool: clear Labels field
- wlReplaytStonesPool: clear intervals
- wlReplayExemplarsPool: clear Labels field
- wlReplayHistogramsPool: clear histogram pointers
- wlReplayFloatHistogramsPool: clear float histogram pointers
- wlReplayMetadataPool: clear metadata strings
- agent walReplaySeriesPool: clear Labels field
- agent walReplayHistogramsPool: clear histogram pointers
- agent walReplayFloatHistogramsPool: clear float histogram pointers

Signed-off-by: Arve Knudsen <[email protected]>
@aknuds1
aknuds1 force-pushed the fix/pool-clearing branch from a116a00 to 6b08742 Compare March 17, 2026 08:11
@beorn7

beorn7 commented Mar 17, 2026

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@aknuds1 I guess silence is consent and you can merge this.

@aknuds1

aknuds1 commented Mar 17, 2026

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Thank you @beorn7 :)

@aknuds1
aknuds1 merged commit fc1c60d into prometheus:main Mar 17, 2026
55 of 56 checks passed
renovate Bot added a commit to sdwilsh/ansible-playbooks that referenced this pull request Apr 8, 2026
##### [\`v3.11.0\`](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.11.0)

- \[CHANGE] Hetzner SD: The `__meta_hetzner_datacenter` label is deprecated for the role `robot` but kept for backward compatibility, use the `__meta_hetzner_robot_datacenter` label instead. For the role `hcloud`, the label is deprecated and will stop working after the 1 July 2026. [#17850](prometheus/prometheus#17850)
- \[CHANGE] Hetzner SD: The `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_datacenter_location` and `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_datacenter_location_network_zone` labels are deprecated, use the `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_location` and `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_location_network_zone` labels instead. [#17850](prometheus/prometheus#17850)
- \[CHANGE] Promtool: Redirect debug output to stderr to avoid interfering with stdout-based tool output. [#18346](prometheus/prometheus#18346)
- \[FEATURE] AWS SD: Add Elasticache Role. [#18099](prometheus/prometheus#18099)
- \[FEATURE] AWS SD: Add RDS Role. [#18206](prometheus/prometheus#18206)
- \[FEATURE] Azure SD: Add support for Azure Workload Identity authentication method. [#17207](prometheus/prometheus#17207)
- \[FEATURE] Discovery: Introduce `prometheus_sd_last_update_timestamp_seconds` metric to track the last time a service discovery update was sent to consumers. [#18194](prometheus/prometheus#18194)
- \[FEATURE] Kubernetes SD: Add support for node role selectors for pod roles. [#18006](prometheus/prometheus#18006)
- \[FEATURE] Kubernetes SD: Introduce pod-based labels for deployment, cronjob, and job controller names: `__meta_kubernetes_pod_deployment_name`, `__meta_kubernetes_pod_cronjob_name` and `__meta_kubernetes_pod_job_name`, respectively. [#17774](prometheus/prometheus#17774)
- \[FEATURE] PromQL: Add `</` and `>/` operators for trimming observations from native histograms. [#17904](prometheus/prometheus#17904)
- \[FEATURE] PromQL: Add experimental `histogram_quantiles` variadic function for computing multiple quantiles at once. [#17285](prometheus/prometheus#17285)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add `storage.tsdb.retention.percentage` configuration to configure the maximum percent of disk usable for TSDB storage. [#18080](prometheus/prometheus#18080)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `fast-startup` feature flag that writes a `series_state.json` file to the WAL directory to track active series state across restarts. [#18303](prometheus/prometheus#18303)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `st-storage` feature flag. When enabled, Prometheus stores ingested start timestamps (ST, previously called Created Timestamp) from scrape or OTLP in the TSDB and Agent WAL, and exposes them via Remote Write 2. [#18062](prometheus/prometheus#18062)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `xor2-encoding` feature flag for the new TSDB block float sample chunk encoding that is optimized for scraped data and allows encoding start timestamps. [#18062](prometheus/prometheus#18062)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] HTTP client: Add AWS `external_id` support for sigv4. [#17916](prometheus/prometheus#17916)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] Kubernetes SD: Deduplicate deprecation warning logs from the Kubernetes API to reduce noise. [#17829](prometheus/prometheus#17829)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] TSDB: Remove old temporary checkpoints when creating a Checkpoint. [#17598](prometheus/prometheus#17598)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] UI: Add autocomplete support for experimental `first_over_time` and `ts_of_first_over_time` PromQL functions. [#18318](prometheus/prometheus#18318)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] Vultr SD: Upgrade govultr library from v2 to v3 for continued security patches and maintenance. [#18347](prometheus/prometheus#18347)
- \[PERF] PromQL: Improve performance and reduce heap allocations in joins (VectorBinop)/And/Or/Unless. [#17159](prometheus/prometheus#17159)
- \[PERF] PromQL: Partially address performance regression in native histogram aggregations due to using `KahanAdd`. [#18252](prometheus/prometheus#18252)
- \[PERF] Remote write: Optimize WAL watching used for RW sending to reuse internal buffers. [#18250](prometheus/prometheus#18250)
- \[PERF] TSDB: Optimize LabelValues intersection performance for matchers. [#18069](prometheus/prometheus#18069)
- \[PERF] UI: Skip restacking on hover in stacked series charts. [#18230](prometheus/prometheus#18230)
- \[BUGFIX] AWS SD: Fix EC2 SD ignoring the configured `endpoint` option, a regression from the AWS SDK v2 migration. [#18133](prometheus/prometheus#18133)
- \[BUGFIX] AWS SD: Fix panic in EC2 SD when DescribeAvailabilityZones returns nil ZoneName or ZoneId. [#18133](prometheus/prometheus#18133)
- \[BUGFIX] Agent: Fix memory leak caused by duplicate SeriesRefs being loaded as active series. [#17538](prometheus/prometheus#17538)
- \[BUGFIX] Alerting: Fix alert state incorrectly resetting to pending when the FOR period is increased in the config file. [#18244](prometheus/prometheus#18244)
- \[BUGFIX] Azure SD: Fix system-assigned managed identity not working when `client_id` is empty. [#18323](prometheus/prometheus#18323)
- \[BUGFIX] Consul SD: Fix filter parameter not being applied to health service endpoint, causing Node and Node.Meta filters to be ignored. [#17349](prometheus/prometheus#17349)
- \[BUGFIX] Kubernetes SD: Fix duplicate targets generated by `*DualStack` EndpointSlices policies. [#18192](prometheus/prometheus#18192)
- \[BUGFIX] OTLP: Fix ErrTooOldSample being returned as HTTP 500 instead of 400 in PRW v2 histogram write paths, preventing infinite client retry loops. [#18084](prometheus/prometheus#18084)
- \[BUGFIX] OTLP: Fix exemplars getting mixed between incorrect parts of a histogram. [#18056](prometheus/prometheus#18056)
- \[BUGFIX] PromQL: Do not skip histogram buckets in queries where histogram trimming is used. [#18263](prometheus/prometheus#18263)
- \[BUGFIX] Remote write: Fix `prometheus_remote_storage_sent_batch_duration_seconds` measuring before the request was sent. [#18214](prometheus/prometheus#18214)
- \[BUGFIX] Rules: Fix alert state restoration when rule labels contain Go template expressions. [#18375](prometheus/prometheus#18375)
- \[BUGFIX] Scrape: Fix panic when parsing bare label names without an equal sign in brace-only metric notation. [#18229](prometheus/prometheus#18229)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fail early when `use-uncached-io` feature flag is set on unsupported environments. [#18219](prometheus/prometheus#18219)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fall back to CLI flag values when retention is removed from config file. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix memory leaks in buffer pools by clearing reference fields before returning buffers to pools. [#17895](prometheus/prometheus#17895)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix missing mmap of histogram chunks during WAL replay. [#18306](prometheus/prometheus#18306)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix storage.tsdb.retention.time unit mismatch in file causing retention to be 1e6 times longer than configured. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
- \[BUGFIX] Tracing: Fix missing traceID in query log when tracing is enabled, previously only spanID was emitted. [#18189](prometheus/prometheus#18189)
- \[BUGFIX] UI: Fix tooltip Y-offset drift when using multiple graph panels. [#18228](prometheus/prometheus#18228)
- \[BUGFIX] UI: Update retention display in runtime info when config is reloaded. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
renovate Bot added a commit to sdwilsh/ansible-playbooks that referenced this pull request Apr 8, 2026
##### [\`v3.11.0\`](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/tag/v3.11.0)

- \[CHANGE] Hetzner SD: The `__meta_hetzner_datacenter` label is deprecated for the role `robot` but kept for backward compatibility, use the `__meta_hetzner_robot_datacenter` label instead. For the role `hcloud`, the label is deprecated and will stop working after the 1 July 2026. [#17850](prometheus/prometheus#17850)
- \[CHANGE] Hetzner SD: The `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_datacenter_location` and `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_datacenter_location_network_zone` labels are deprecated, use the `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_location` and `__meta_hetzner_hcloud_location_network_zone` labels instead. [#17850](prometheus/prometheus#17850)
- \[CHANGE] Promtool: Redirect debug output to stderr to avoid interfering with stdout-based tool output. [#18346](prometheus/prometheus#18346)
- \[FEATURE] AWS SD: Add Elasticache Role. [#18099](prometheus/prometheus#18099)
- \[FEATURE] AWS SD: Add RDS Role. [#18206](prometheus/prometheus#18206)
- \[FEATURE] Azure SD: Add support for Azure Workload Identity authentication method. [#17207](prometheus/prometheus#17207)
- \[FEATURE] Discovery: Introduce `prometheus_sd_last_update_timestamp_seconds` metric to track the last time a service discovery update was sent to consumers. [#18194](prometheus/prometheus#18194)
- \[FEATURE] Kubernetes SD: Add support for node role selectors for pod roles. [#18006](prometheus/prometheus#18006)
- \[FEATURE] Kubernetes SD: Introduce pod-based labels for deployment, cronjob, and job controller names: `__meta_kubernetes_pod_deployment_name`, `__meta_kubernetes_pod_cronjob_name` and `__meta_kubernetes_pod_job_name`, respectively. [#17774](prometheus/prometheus#17774)
- \[FEATURE] PromQL: Add `</` and `>/` operators for trimming observations from native histograms. [#17904](prometheus/prometheus#17904)
- \[FEATURE] PromQL: Add experimental `histogram_quantiles` variadic function for computing multiple quantiles at once. [#17285](prometheus/prometheus#17285)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add `storage.tsdb.retention.percentage` configuration to configure the maximum percent of disk usable for TSDB storage. [#18080](prometheus/prometheus#18080)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `fast-startup` feature flag that writes a `series_state.json` file to the WAL directory to track active series state across restarts. [#18303](prometheus/prometheus#18303)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `st-storage` feature flag. When enabled, Prometheus stores ingested start timestamps (ST, previously called Created Timestamp) from scrape or OTLP in the TSDB and Agent WAL, and exposes them via Remote Write 2. [#18062](prometheus/prometheus#18062)
- \[FEATURE] TSDB: Add an experimental `xor2-encoding` feature flag for the new TSDB block float sample chunk encoding that is optimized for scraped data and allows encoding start timestamps. [#18062](prometheus/prometheus#18062)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] HTTP client: Add AWS `external_id` support for sigv4. [#17916](prometheus/prometheus#17916)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] Kubernetes SD: Deduplicate deprecation warning logs from the Kubernetes API to reduce noise. [#17829](prometheus/prometheus#17829)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] TSDB: Remove old temporary checkpoints when creating a Checkpoint. [#17598](prometheus/prometheus#17598)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] UI: Add autocomplete support for experimental `first_over_time` and `ts_of_first_over_time` PromQL functions. [#18318](prometheus/prometheus#18318)
- \[ENHANCEMENT] Vultr SD: Upgrade govultr library from v2 to v3 for continued security patches and maintenance. [#18347](prometheus/prometheus#18347)
- \[PERF] PromQL: Improve performance and reduce heap allocations in joins (VectorBinop)/And/Or/Unless. [#17159](prometheus/prometheus#17159)
- \[PERF] PromQL: Partially address performance regression in native histogram aggregations due to using `KahanAdd`. [#18252](prometheus/prometheus#18252)
- \[PERF] Remote write: Optimize WAL watching used for RW sending to reuse internal buffers. [#18250](prometheus/prometheus#18250)
- \[PERF] TSDB: Optimize LabelValues intersection performance for matchers. [#18069](prometheus/prometheus#18069)
- \[PERF] UI: Skip restacking on hover in stacked series charts. [#18230](prometheus/prometheus#18230)
- \[BUGFIX] AWS SD: Fix EC2 SD ignoring the configured `endpoint` option, a regression from the AWS SDK v2 migration. [#18133](prometheus/prometheus#18133)
- \[BUGFIX] AWS SD: Fix panic in EC2 SD when DescribeAvailabilityZones returns nil ZoneName or ZoneId. [#18133](prometheus/prometheus#18133)
- \[BUGFIX] Agent: Fix memory leak caused by duplicate SeriesRefs being loaded as active series. [#17538](prometheus/prometheus#17538)
- \[BUGFIX] Alerting: Fix alert state incorrectly resetting to pending when the FOR period is increased in the config file. [#18244](prometheus/prometheus#18244)
- \[BUGFIX] Azure SD: Fix system-assigned managed identity not working when `client_id` is empty. [#18323](prometheus/prometheus#18323)
- \[BUGFIX] Consul SD: Fix filter parameter not being applied to health service endpoint, causing Node and Node.Meta filters to be ignored. [#17349](prometheus/prometheus#17349)
- \[BUGFIX] Kubernetes SD: Fix duplicate targets generated by `*DualStack` EndpointSlices policies. [#18192](prometheus/prometheus#18192)
- \[BUGFIX] OTLP: Fix ErrTooOldSample being returned as HTTP 500 instead of 400 in PRW v2 histogram write paths, preventing infinite client retry loops. [#18084](prometheus/prometheus#18084)
- \[BUGFIX] OTLP: Fix exemplars getting mixed between incorrect parts of a histogram. [#18056](prometheus/prometheus#18056)
- \[BUGFIX] PromQL: Do not skip histogram buckets in queries where histogram trimming is used. [#18263](prometheus/prometheus#18263)
- \[BUGFIX] Remote write: Fix `prometheus_remote_storage_sent_batch_duration_seconds` measuring before the request was sent. [#18214](prometheus/prometheus#18214)
- \[BUGFIX] Rules: Fix alert state restoration when rule labels contain Go template expressions. [#18375](prometheus/prometheus#18375)
- \[BUGFIX] Scrape: Fix panic when parsing bare label names without an equal sign in brace-only metric notation. [#18229](prometheus/prometheus#18229)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fail early when `use-uncached-io` feature flag is set on unsupported environments. [#18219](prometheus/prometheus#18219)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fall back to CLI flag values when retention is removed from config file. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix memory leaks in buffer pools by clearing reference fields before returning buffers to pools. [#17895](prometheus/prometheus#17895)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix missing mmap of histogram chunks during WAL replay. [#18306](prometheus/prometheus#18306)
- \[BUGFIX] TSDB: Fix storage.tsdb.retention.time unit mismatch in file causing retention to be 1e6 times longer than configured. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
- \[BUGFIX] Tracing: Fix missing traceID in query log when tracing is enabled, previously only spanID was emitted. [#18189](prometheus/prometheus#18189)
- \[BUGFIX] UI: Fix tooltip Y-offset drift when using multiple graph panels. [#18228](prometheus/prometheus#18228)
- \[BUGFIX] UI: Update retention display in runtime info when config is reloaded. [#18200](prometheus/prometheus#18200)
@aknuds1
aknuds1 deleted the fix/pool-clearing branch July 9, 2026 07:05
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