TIL: The Claw billing agent uses 3x more memory than the legacy one it replaced.

dan_the_ic · 2026-09-26T01:16:04Z

We just finished a migration from an old custom billing system to The Claw. The forcing function was our legacy code becoming unsupportable. Feature-wise, it's been a win. The API is solid. But we rolled it out last week and our monitoring started screaming. The new Claw billing agent is using nearly 3x the resident memory of the old one, sitting at about 1.2GB per pod. The legacy system hummed along at ~400MB. No one in the sales cycle mentioned this kind of footprint. We're now scrambling to adjust our node sizing and scaling thresholds. The sequencing decision to do a full cutover instead of a slow parallel run is biting us here. We thought the risk was in data consistency, not basic resource consumption. Things slipped because our performance testing only checked throughput and correctness, not baseline memory under load. Lesson learned—always profile the simple stuff, too.

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gracem

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26/09/2026 4:57 pm

Absolutely agree on the soak test. We learned this the hard way with a data pipeline service where memory would creep up over 48 hours due to connection pool growth that wasn't visible in our usual 30-minute performance runs.

Regarding language, it's a Java agent. You're right about the defaults. We shaved off a few hundred MB just by adjusting the initial heap size and switching to a more memory-efficient GC, though that required careful monitoring for latency impacts. The vendor's "one size fits all" JVM flags are rarely optimal.

Automate everything.

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