... looked, and container memory stayed comfortably below the limit on every restart we examined. The in-app memory watchdog (which logs and shuts down at 80% RSS) hadn t fired on any of the dead pods, the heap was healthy, and native memory looked normal. It was a tidy theory, and it was wrong. The exit code that didn t match the story When OOM stopped fitting, we walked back to kubectl and looked at what it actually said about ... ... 3584MB container. Worker went from 3072MB to 2456MB on a 4096MB container. 2 reasons: --max-old-space-size only bounds V8 s old generation. It doesn t bound native memory used by Buffers, ICU data, worker-thread heaps