<p>cAdvisor reports 14GB for the memory used by Prometheus where as top reports 6.xGB.</p>

<p>Can someone explain why this discrepancy? </p>

<p>The documentatation of container_memory_usage_bytes says </p>

<pre><code>Current memory usage in bytes, including all memory regardless of when it was accessed
</code></pre>

<p>but it's not clear what this refers to - I assume it's virtual memory size?</p>

<p>As reported by cAdvisor:</p>

<pre><code>core@ip-172-20-100-148 ~ $ curl -q localhost:4194/metrics | grep container_memory_usage_bytes | grep prometheus
container_memory_usage_bytes{container_name="prometheus",id="/docker/d37e7503309e632265cb834095efa949da4dc3c72122cb290e626f1121d0ed6b",image="quay.io/prometheus/prometheus:v1.7.1",name="k8s_prometheus.71f5f8c6_prometheus-zwvhx_xx-system_9753de21-aaac-11e7-97e5-026a05f72f78_4682ea0b",namespace="xx-system",pod_name="prometheus-zwvhx"} 1.4178545664e+10
</code></pre>

<p>As reported by top on the host machine:</p>

<pre><code>Tasks: 272 total,   1 running, 271 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 20.2 us,  2.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 75.9 id,  0.5 wa,  0.6 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  65964640 total, 64892592 used,  1072048 free,  5222520 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free.  4737420 cached Mem

   PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                   
118446 root      20   0 6783108 6.154g  19864 S 316.7  9.8   8241:05 prometheus 
</code></pre>

<p>Per the discussion <a href="https://github.com/google/cadvisor/issues/913" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, cAdvisor reports a <em>total</em> memory usage in bytes. </p>

<p>In your case,  <em>cAdvisor</em> was reporting <code>1.4178545664e+10 Byte = 14.178545664 Gigabyte</code>. Note it was <code>e+10</code> so it is approximately 14G, not 1.4G.</p>
