O.K. I confused the content service workers with the pulpcore workers.
# systemctl status pulpcore-worker@*.service
shows me the 8 configured pulpcore workers.
# systemctl status pulpcore-content.service
shows me the pulpcore-content “app” workers. Those are 17 and that number doesn’t seem to be configurable with foreman-installer at the moment.
But those are the processes which use up all the memory, because each one can use 6 GB or more, which is far to large if you are running 17 worker processes.
So it’s the content worker processes not the pulpcore workers as I wrote initially…
I think when processes are dying you should see the large memory usage with top or ps aux.