Can the memory checked inside the ecs fargate and the memory of the task definition be different?

Question

I set 1 vcpu/ 2 memory in task definition in aws ecs fargate.

To check the memory of the app inside, I accessed the container directly through the aws exceute command and checked the memory through free and top, but it was set to 8gb. Why did this happen?

Accepted Answer

, it's possible that you're seeing the total memory available to the underlying infrastructure (the EC2 instance) rather than the memory limit set for your specific Fargate task. Fargate abstracts the underlying server infrastructure, but when you run commands like free or top inside a container, they report information about the underlying host, not the individual container.

The memory value that you set in the task definition is used by AWS to allocate resources and to enforce memory limits, but it might not be directly visible inside the container using tools like free or top.

To investigate further, you might consider monitoring the memory usage of your task using CloudWatch, or looking into container-level monitoring tools which are designed to report metrics in a containerized environment.

Can the memory checked inside the ecs fargate and the memory of the task definition be different?

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