High memory usage and OOM kill of 'iptables' and 'iptables-save' processes

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • The server is experiencing out of memory events and the top memory consuming processes are iptables and iptables-save.
  • The iptables and iptables-save are having very high memory utilization when running Kubernetes[k3s].

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
  • iptables-1.8.4 (any version)
  • Observed with "k3s" Kubernetes distribution, but can be caused with regular RHEL iptables usage too

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