# OpenTelemetry Collector v0.165.0 improves memory safety and profile sampling

> **Key takeaway:** The release introduces security hardening against malicious payloads and enhances observability for profile sampling.

**Published:** 2026-11-06T23:42:20+00:00 
**Source:** OpenTelemetry Collector Releases 
**Category:** cloud-native 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/opentelemetry-collector-v01650-improves-memory-safety-and-pr.html 

## Summary
The OpenTelemetry Collector has released version 0.165.0, introducing several critical security enhancements and performance optimizations. This update focuses on hardening the collector against resource exhaustion attacks and improving the efficiency of data processing within the pipeline.

Key changes include new observability features for profile sample metrics and the promotion of the queue_batch processor to beta for traces, metrics, and logs. Additionally, the release addresses potential stability issues by implementing recursion limits and stricter memory allocation bounds for compressed data.

## Technical improvements and security hardening
- **Security Hardening:** Added a recursion depth limit of 100 to the proto unmarshalling of AnyValue, ArrayValue, KeyValueList, and KeyValue to prevent stack overflow attacks from deeply nested payloads.
- **Memory Management:** Implemented bounds on the zstd decoder window for both gRPC and HTTP components, ensuring the window size is constrained by configured message size limits to prevent large, malicious allocations.
- **Observability Enhancements:** Introduced xreceiverhelper with an ObsReport that tracks profile sample metrics (accepted, refused, failed) using a specific sample_type attribute.
- **Performance Optimization:** Improved the performance of pcommon.Map functions (Get, Range, and All) and reduced memory allocations when updating oneof primitives in the pdata package.
- **Processor Updates:** The queue_batch processor has been promoted to beta status for traces, metrics, and logs, while remaining in alpha for profiles.

## Why it matters
These updates are vital for cloud-native infrastructure operators who rely on the OpenTelemetry Collector for reliable telemetry ingestion. The security fixes specifically protect distributed systems from denial-of-service attacks via malformed telemetry data, while the performance improvements reduce the resource overhead of observability pipelines.