There's a huge difference between giving engineers 20% time to work on open source code, and choosing to fix a memory leak by debugging the OS rather than using a health monitor to automatically restart an app. For a start, there's no guarantee that the devs will succeed. It might be a huge waste of time. That's a massive risk.

"Debugging the OS" sounds not just a little bit pretentious. Perhaps call it "troubleshooting" instead, because that's what's being done. That the problem was found in a driver doesn't make it any different from faulty shell script or a faulty hard disk.

> That's a massive risk.

Leaving a leak in your code base is a risk too. What if it scales with something outside of your control and suddenly you have to restart every 15 seconds?

Add more pods.

Its literally the answer to every devOps problem.

(This is a joke btw.)

(... or is it?)

for some.. sadly not a joke

Sure there is, however our company and debug culture also did not take restarts as a solution for memory leaks either.

Sometimes quality matters more than money