--- title: Why Is One Kubernetes Pod Working Hard While the Others... description: A discussion raises the common Kubernetes issue where one pod becomes a hotspot while sibling replicas stay idle, often due to persistent TCP connections... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/why-is-one-kubernetes-pod-working-hard-while-the-others-sit-idle--imqzkdzcy twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Why Is One Kubernetes Pod Working Hard While the Others Sit Idle? | daily.dev og:description: A discussion raises the common Kubernetes issue where one pod becomes a hotspot while sibling replicas stay idle, often due to persistent TCP connections... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-is-one-kubernetes-pod-working-hard-while-the-others-sit-idle--imqzkdzcy og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/iMqZkdZcy.png og:image:alt: Why Is One Kubernetes Pod Working Hard While the Others Sit Idle? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why Is One Kubernetes Pod Working Hard While the Others Sit Idle? **[Kubernetes & Cloud Native Community](https://daily.dev/sources/kubernetescloudnativecommunity)** · [@divyansh30](https://daily.dev/divyansh30) · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A discussion raises the common Kubernetes issue where one pod becomes a hotspot while sibling replicas stay idle, often due to persistent TCP connections pinning traffic to a single backend after the initial handshake. The poster notes that adding replicas or relying on HPA doesn't fix this because it's a connection-affinity problem, not a capacity problem. A linked write-up reproduces the behavior on EKS and explores mitigation approaches at the application, cluster, and platform layers, and the poster invites others to share their own experiences debugging 'hot pod' issues in production. ## Content Ever seen a Kubernetes deployment where one pod is running hot while the other replicas barely do anything? The first instinct is usually to add more replicas or let HPA scale the deployment. But that doesn't always solve the problem. With persistent TCP connections, traffic can stay pinned to the same backend pod after the initial connection is established. So you can end up with one overloaded pod while the others sit mostly idle. I'm curious if others have run into this: - Have you seen traffic skew between otherwise identical pods? - Did HPA actually help, or did it just create more idle pods? - How are you handling long-lived connections in Kubernetes? - Are you solving this at the application, cluster, or platform layer? I came across this write-up while looking into the problem. It reproduces the behavior on EKS and looks at different ways to address it. [https://www.kubeblogs.com/kubernetes-traffic-skew-why-one-pod-gets-hot-while-others-sit-idle/](https://www.kubeblogs.com/kubernetes-traffic-skew-why-one-pod-gets-hot-while-others-sit-idle/) Has anyone had to debug a “hot pod” problem like this in production? #Kubernetes #CloudNative #KubernetesNetworking #DevOps #SRE --- Tags: [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws), [#kubernetes](https://daily.dev/tags/kubernetes), [#networking](https://daily.dev/tags/networking), [#sre](https://daily.dev/tags/sre) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-is-one-kubernetes-pod-working-hard-while-the-others-sit-idle--imqzkdzcy) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-is-one-kubernetes-pod-working-hard-while-the-others-sit-idle--imqzkdzcy","headline":"Why Is One Kubernetes Pod Working Hard While the Others Sit Idle?","text":"A discussion raises the common Kubernetes issue where one pod becomes a hotspot while sibling replicas stay idle, often due to persistent TCP connections pinning traffic to a single backend after the initial handshake. The poster notes that adding replicas or relying on HPA doesn't fix this because it's a connection-affinity problem, not a capacity problem. 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