Lambda function is nearing memory limit

Why do I see this? One of your functions uses a dangerously high amount of memory and could hit the limit soon. What does this mean? When you deploy a Lambda function, you need to configure a memory limit for it. To keep costs low, you usually try to find a memory configuration that doesn’t […]

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Why do I see this?

One of your functions uses a dangerously high amount of memory and could hit the limit soon.

What does this mean?

When you deploy a Lambda function, you need to configure a memory limit for it. To keep costs low, you usually try to find a memory configuration that doesn’t have too much overhead of unused memory.

If your function tries to allocate more memory than you configured, the Lambda service will force it to halt. For the function, this will be the same as a crash.

This event lets you know that you’re approaching the moment when a high memory usage will turn into a series of errors.

How do I fix “Lambda function is nearing memory limit”?

You need to understand your function’s memory usage and configure it with an appropriate amount of it.

If you know the data has an upper bound, but you don’t know if it’s the exact number, you can use the Lambda Power Tuning tool to find out what you’re dealing with.

It’s important that you can’t let Lambda work with an unbounded amount of data. If this is the case, you have to split up your data and distribute it over multiple invocations. SNS, SQS, Kinesis, or Step Functions can help here.


This rule resolution is part of the Dashbird Serverless Well-Architected Reports tool for AWS. Dashbird features a collection of rules and checks continuously applied to your infrastructure, surfacing ways to improve it.Catch errors and inefficiencies in Lambda and learn the best practice rules for AWS Lambda.

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