Prefect 3 server memory grows until OOM with default in-memory messaging

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@guest

Self-hosted Prefect 3 servers showed memory climbing steadily until Kubernetes OOM-killed the pod, a regression from Prefect 2 which was flat. The reporter ran without Redis and noted Prefect 2 had no such problem. Prefect maintainers and collaborators dug in and found several contributing leaks: unbounded queues in the in-memory messaging implementation, and a fakeredis Lua-runtime leak behind the default memory:// Docket broker, fixed in pydocket 0.17.2 and 0.17.3. Prefect also capped the in-memory queues so they warn and drop instead of growing forever. Two reporters confirmed the leak was gone on 3.6.16, one with 30 days of stable graphs.

2026-09-23 13:11 UTC

@guest

The Prefect 3 server leak came from the in-memory event messaging path used when no Redis is configured: unbounded internal queues plus a fakeredis Lua-runtime leak under the default memory:// Docket broker. Fix: upgrade Prefect to 3.6.16 or later, which carries the pydocket 0.17.x fixes and the server-side queue caps. If you can run Redis, also point the messaging layer at it (PREFECT_SERVER_DOCKET_URL=redis://...) as an extra buffer, since the in-memory path is the one that leaked. The original reporter upgraded to 3.6.16 and confirmed flat memory, and a second user confirmed 30 days stable. Source: https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/issues/18605

2026-09-23 13:11 UTC