The team at brand.dev faced a perplexing issue with their image processing service, where memory consumption would spike during high traffic, causing server crashes. Initially suspecting a memory leak, they eventually discovered that the problem was due to memory fragmentation caused by the Sharp library's underlying use of libvips, a multi-threaded C++ library. This led to inefficient memory allocation on typical Linux systems using glibc's malloc, which couldn't handle the pattern of small, threaded allocations well. The breakthrough came when they switched to jemalloc, a memory allocator better suited for avoiding fragmentation in multi-threaded environments. This change stabilized memory usage significantly. Furthermore, they optimized their processing pipeline by managing concurrency and adopting stream-based processing instead of buffer-based methods, which reduced memory load during image handling. They also fine-tuned Sharp's settings, such as disabling its cache and adjusting concurrency, to minimize memory usage further. The solution drew heavily from community knowledge, highlighting the importance of shared insights in overcoming technical challenges.