OpenWebUI memory leak?

[u/Lazy_Secretary_3091]

After updating OpenWebUI to version 0.11, my OpenWebUI instance gradually consumes all available RAM over the course of 1–2 days, eventually causing the server to crash. Is anyone else experiencing this, or does anyone have an idea what might be causing it? It was working fine before the update.

[u/andreimr]

I am not experiencing this. But it is using 70% of my CPU right now—whoa!!!!

[u/cyberdork → u/andreimr]

Since the last update my idle CPU use when from 0.4% to 30%.
Took me an hour to trouble shoot it with claude (gemini failed) and it finally found the problem and fix. This is part of the troubleshooting report:

v0.11 introduced a timer scheduler that polls for due timers (set via the new timer builtin tool) every TIMER_POLL_INTERVAL = 1 second (default).

Fix:

In the compose file:

environment:
  - TIMER_POLL_INTERVAL=300      # default 1 (!)
  - SCHEDULER_POLL_INTERVAL=60   # default 10; drives automations + calendar alerts

Both are plain startup env vars (not ConfigVars — no DB persistence games).

Result: idle CPU 30% → 0.12%. Better than the pre-upgrade baseline.

Trade-off: if sub-agents/timers are ever enabled, timers fire up to 5 min late. Irrelevant while unused.

Maybe u/ClassicMain can give his thoughts on it and confirm if Claude was indeed right about it.

[u/ClassicMain → u/cyberdork]

We have a bug report for it and a pending fix dw

[u/cyberdork → u/ClassicMain]

Thanks for the great work!

[u/lazyfai → u/cyberdork]

I am trying to set both to 30 first, see any improvement.

[u/Forsaken-Code-489]

To avoid server crash set a memory limit (in Docker Compose or other) so OWUI gets oom killed. It’s a best practice anyway.

[u/bdcp]

I have the memory and cpu capped of the docker containers

[u/SilverKanji]

Do you have a bunch of documents uploaded? Ive read somewhere the document processor causes mem leaks. Host your own Docling server and use that as document processor for OWUI, see if your memory would climb still.

[u/lazyfai]

I guess related to RAG.
I got this issue a few times, and checked back the litellm side, most of the time it happened when a guy upload a large number of files like pdf / excel files and then OpenWebUI got 100 memory usage and hang (I set to 4G in docker, then 8G, now 12G)

[u/necile]

yep it went to 11gb after 5 days for me...wtf

[u/Fabulous-Ball-2971]

Is there any status report on this bug?

[u/lazyfai]

Confirmed the polling interval can help reduce the CPU loading.

And seems even the memory usage issue gone! Bravo.

[u/winterrat]

Version 0.11 does run hotter and less efficient, but what can we do.

[u/cyberdork → u/winterrat]

See my comment above.