Containers sharing cache/memory

HI,

I have 6 containers running on a host. These containers run different applications based out of different languages/runtimes. java, python, erlang …

Sometimes one of these containers running emqtt(erlang) process crashes after consuming more memory. there is a restart policy associated to this container to restart on failure. When this container restarts after a crash, im seeing ghe memory consumption of all dockers coming down by a huge percentage.

For instance, before the crash on a 16GB machine, the dockers each are consuming some where around a 2 GB to 4GB. When one of the containers crashes and restarts the memory consumption of all containers comes down to about a GB or 500 MB.

the containers use the java and python runtimes from the host and the only folder that is shared across containers is the log folder to write logs to.

can some one help me understand why im seeing a drop in memory consumption across all containers when only one of the container restarts after crash.