Resolving OOM Caused by InMemoryReporterMetrics in Spring Cloud Sleuth Zipkin Integration

Problem description : An application using Spring Cloud Sleuth with Zipkin‑reporter 2.7.3 experiences frequent OOM (GC overhead limit exceeded) and CPU usage reaching 300% due to the InMemoryReporterMetrics component.

Environment : Spring Cloud version F, dependency

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin</artifactId>
</dependency>
Version: 2.0.0.RELEASE

.

Investigation steps :

Check service health URL and process existence.

Inspect logs – discovered OOM errors.

Collect system metrics with top -H -p 11441 and identify threads consuming >90% CPU.

Save diagnostic data: load snapshot, thread list, TCP connections, jstack, jmap, jstat, and heap dump.

Analyze GC logs (e.g.,

S0  S1  E  O  M  CCS  YGC  YGCT  FGC  FGCT  GCT
 0.00 0.00 100.00 99.94 90.56 87.86 875 9.307 3223 5313.139 5322.446

) showing excessive old‑generation GC.

Use Eclipse MAT to examine heap dump; large object identified as zipkin2.reporter.InMemoryReporterMetrics (retained size ~925 MB).

Root cause analysis : The older zipkin‑reporter‑2.7.3 jar contains a bug where ConcurrentHashMap<Throwable, AtomicLong> is used, causing massive memory retention. Upgrading to zipkin‑reporter‑2.8.4 (or newer) fixes the issue.

Solution : Replace the old dependency with the newer version, for example:

<!-- zipkin dependency -->
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.zipkin.brave</groupId>
  <artifactId>brave</artifactId>
  <version>5.6.4</version>
</dependency>

Optionally add JVM flags to generate heap dumps on OOM:

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
-XX:HeapDumpPath=path/filename.hprof

After upgrading and redeploying, the OOM and CPU spikes disappear.

References : Original troubleshooting article (Jianshu) and related GitHub issues/PRs for zipkin‑reporter.