Immich is running out of memory while creating thumbnails (runaway memory)

[parth017]

I have searched the existing issues, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate report.

• Yes

The bug

While attempting to generate thumbnails for approximately 45,000 images stored on the server, the immich server repeatedly encounters memory shortages and restarts with the same issue again and again. Seems like the garbage collection is not working in the jobs as it should so memory usage keeps increasing until hitting max.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Debian 12

Version of Immich Server

v1.144.1

Version of Immich Mobile App

v1.144.1

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Device make and model

No response

Your docker-compose.yml content

not relevant, same as docker-compose from repo

Your .env content

not relevant

Reproduction steps

1. With bigger library, go to Jobs
2. Generate Thumbnails jobs >> All
3. Observer the server memory usage and restart behavior.

Relevant log output

Additional information

No response

[droopanu]

Hello,

I have noticed the same issue since upgrading to 1.144.1.

I upgraded around 10.20, and look at the memory hog afterwards

Currently the only jobs running are the the face detection and facial recognition:

[mertalev]

Hi, which release did you upgrade from?

[droopanu]

@mertalev from 1.143.1

I can confirm @parth017 assessment that this seems to be caused by Thumbnail Generation.

In my case it seems that facial recognition triggers a regeneration of the thumbnails and that causes the memory leak.
As soon as I pause the thumbnail generation job, the memory leak stops.

[parth017]

Hi, which release did you upgrade from?

upgraded from v1.143.1

[mertalev]

It seems that Trixie uses a buggy alpha release of libmimalloc, which has relevant bug fixes relating to freeing memory in its changelog since the 3.0.1 alpha. We can comment out the LD_PRELOAD line in the start script until that's resolved.

[parth017]

can we not revert this to use v2 meanwhile?

38226fd

[mertalev]

Setting that to 2 is no different than commenting it out. It just doesn't use libmimalloc in either case.

[parth017]

Setting that to 2 is no different than commenting it out. It just doesn't use libmimalloc in either case.

Got it

[G36maid]

Same problem here.

While attempting to generate thumbnails for approximately 180,000 images,
immich-server keeps consuming all my memory, eventually hitting OOM and restarting the container.

I'm deploying via Docker Compose on Arch rolling (kernel 6.12.49-1-lts), Immich v1.144.1.

Temporary workaround: I've limited the Docker memory to prevent impacting other services,
but the container still keeps restarting during thumbnail generation.

When limit to 6GB on 8GB VMs (Red is immich-server):