Metabase 0.50.x high CPU and OOM crashes after upgrading from 0.49

After upgrading Metabase from 0.49.x to 0.50.x, many deployments saw severe CPU spikes and memory growth, with containers crashing every few hours from out-of-memory. Downgrading to 0.49.12 made it go away. The thread (130+ comments) covered several symptoms: slow metadata endpoints, GC thrashing, and OOM kills, mostly on larger dashboards.

This was a real regression in the 0.50 line, not a config problem. The Metabase team traced the OOMs to a thread leak and fixed it in PR #45253, which shipped in the 0.50.7+ releases; the maintainers asked everyone on the thread to upgrade to 0.50.7 and then closed the issue once the fix was out.

So if Metabase 0.50.x is eating memory and crashing after an upgrade from 0.49: upgrade to 0.50.7 or newer. Workarounds people used in the meantime were downgrading back to 0.49.12, or trying MB_SQL_PARSING_ENABLED=false (which helped some setups but not the OOMs). The durable fix is the patched release.

Source: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/44359