Or: how we learned that “eventually” isn’t good enough when you’re bleeding file descriptors Drop Traits: The Day We Stopped Restarting Pods Every 8 Hours Or: how we learned that “eventually” isn’t good enough when you’re bleeding file descriptors Deterministic cleanup means knowing exactly when resources are freed — the difference between memory chaos and predictable system behavior in production environments. So our video transcoding service was… how do I put this delicately… a complete disaster. Not in the “everything’s on fire” way. More like the “slow leak that nobody wants to admit is a real problem” way. We were processing 2.4 million videos daily, which sounds impressive until you realize we had to restart every single pod every 8 hours or it would just… die. Memory would start at a reasonable 2GB per pod. Then climb. And climb. And by hour 7, we’d be sitting at 14GB and sweating, watching the graphs, waiting for the OOM killer to show up like an unwelcome dinner guest.…