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# Technical Advisory 44166

Publication date: February 12, 2020

## Description

When running `SHOW JOBS` or viewing the Jobs page in the Admin UI, high memory usage can be incurred on a node to the point it could crash.

## Statement

`SHOW JOBS` and the Jobs page in the Admin UI internally load all the job descriptions from the cluster in RAM before displaying them.

Under reasonable production settings, a single backup job payload may exceed 5MB in size. Considering an hourly backup and default property for `jobs.retention_time` set to 336h, a single use of `SHOW JOBS` or a single user of the Jobs page in the Admin UI can incur \~1.7GB of memory utilization. This allocation is then multiplied by the number of concurrent accesses to the jobs table.

Starting in CockroachDB v19.2.3, new jobs payloads are reduced in size. A later version will also avoid loading old job entries in memory when viewing recent jobs.

## Mitigation

It is possible to reduce the number of job entries overall by setting the `jobs.retention_time` cluster setting to a value closer to 48h or 24h.

For example:

```sql theme={"theme":{"light":"catppuccin-mocha","dark":"catppuccin-mocha"}}
SET CLUSTER SETTING jobs.retention_time='48:00:00'.
```

Additionally, if the nodes are observed to crash due to excessive memory usage, it may be necessary to truncate the job history. This can be achieved, for example, with:

```sql theme={"theme":{"light":"catppuccin-mocha","dark":"catppuccin-mocha"}}
DELETE from system.jobs
WHERE status = 'succeeded'
  AND created < (now() - '2 days'::interval);
```

## Impact

All deployments running CockroachDB v19.2.0 to v19.2.2 are affected.

Questions about any technical alert can be directed to our [support team](https://support.cockroachlabs.com/).