1.7. Improving net-istio memory usage by using secret filtering for Service Mesh

By default, the informers implementation for the Kubernetes client-go library fetches all resources of a particular type. This can lead to a substantial overhead when many resources are available, which can cause the Knative net-istio ingress controller to fail on large clusters due to memory leaking. However, a filtering mechanism is available for the Knative net-istio ingress controller, which enables the controllers to only fetch Knative related secrets.

The secret filtering is enabled by default on the OpenShift Serverless Operator side. An environment variable, ENABLE_SECRET_INFORMER_FILTERING_BY_CERT_UID=true, is added by default to the net-istio controller pods.

You can disable the secret filtering by setting the ENABLE_SECRET_INFORMER_FILTERING_BY_CERT_UID variable to false by using the workloads field in the KnativeServing custom resource (CR).

apiVersion: operator.knative.dev/v1beta1
kind: KnativeServing
metadata:
  name: knative-serving
  namespace: knative-serving
spec:
...
  workloads:
    - env:
        - container: controller
          envVars:
            - name: ENABLE_SECRET_INFORMER_FILTERING_BY_CERT_UID
              value: 'false'
      name: net-istio-controller