Marco Pracucci

AWS Lambda /tmp sum up to max memory used

by Marco Pracucci Comments

Today, while debugging an apparently memory leak in our Node.JS lambda, I discovered that whatever you write to /tmp sums up to the “Max Memory Used” reported by the Lambda and accounts for the Lambda max memory limit.

As of today, I’ve not been able to find any specific reference in the official documentation, and the AWS Lambda Limits just mentions the max /tmp size:

Resource Limit
/tmp directory storage 512 MB

To confirm my finding I’ve built a simple test lambda which, for each execution, appends 10MB to a temporary file /tmp/test. If you invoke the lambda adding a couple of seconds of delay between each invocation, the already existing context will be reused and the “Max Memory Used” report will increase by 10MB on each invocation:

const fs = require("fs");

/**
 * Each execution of this lambda will append 10MB to
 * /tmp/test file and its size increase will be summed
 * up to "Max Memory Used" reported by Lambda in CloudWatch Logs.
 */
exports.test = function(event, context, callback) {
    const fd   = fs.openSync("/tmp/test", "a");
    const data = new Array(10240).join("0");

    for (var i = 0; i < 1024; i++) {
        fs.writeSync(fd, data);
    }

    fs.closeSync(fd);

    callback(null, "Done");
}

To sum it up, as of 20th Nov 2018, according to my experiments:


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