memory size argument -m clarification

[Javier Arias Losada]

Hello there,

we're running memcached in containers, with the maximum memory of the process restricted at container startup.

In some cases where the number of keys in the process is big (>100K), our containers die due to Out Of Memory OOM.

We set the memcached memory -m to the expected dataset size, and memory for the container we give about 500MB of slack over the memcached -m. We do this for all containers, but some with high keys number are killed by OOM.

Is the argument for memory (-m) for both keys and values? or just values?

Any idea why these containers go OOM? 

Thank you very much.

Best