I'm using celery 2.5.1 with django on a micro ec2 instance with 613mb memory and as such have to keep memory consumption down.

Currently I'm using it only for the scheduler "celery beat" as a web interface to cron, though I hope to use it for more in the future. I've noticed it is the biggest consumer of memory on my micro machine even though I have configured the number of workers to one. I don't have many other options set in settings.py:

import djcelery
djcelery.setup_loader()
BROKER_BACKEND = 'djkombu.transport.DatabaseTransport'
CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULER = 'djcelery.schedulers.DatabaseScheduler'
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'database'

BROKER_POOL_LIMIT = 2
CELERYD_CONCURRENCY = 1
CELERY_DISABLE_RATE_LIMITS = True
CELERYD_MAX_TASKS_PER_CHILD = 20
CELERYD_SOFT_TASK_TIME_LIMIT = 5 * 60
CELERYD_TASK_TIME_LIMIT = 6 * 60

Here's the details via top:

 PID USER  NI CPU%  VIRT   SHR  RES  MEM% Command 
1065 wuser 10  0.0  283M  4548  85m  14.3 python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat
1025 wuser 10  1.0  577M  6368  67m  11.2 python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat
1071 wuser 10  0.0  578M  2384  62m  10.6 python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat

That's about 214mb of memory (and not much shared) to run a cron job occasionally. Have I done anything wrong, or can this be reduced about ten-fold somehow? ;)

Update: here's my upstart config:

description "Celery Daemon"

start on (net-device-up and local-filesystems)
stop on runlevel [016]
nice 10
respawn
respawn limit 5 10
chdir /home/wuser/wuser/
env CELERYD_OPTS=--concurrency=1

exec sudo -u wuser -H /usr/bin/python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat --concurrency=1 --loglevel info --logfile /var/tmp/celeryd.log

Update 2:

I notice there is one root process, one user child process, and two grandchildren from that. So I think it isn't a matter of duplicate startup.

root  34580  1556 sudo -u wuser -H /usr/bin/python manage_prod.py celeryd 
wuser  577M 67548 +- python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat --concurrency=1 
wuser  578M 63784    +-  python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat --concurrency=1
wuser  271M 76260    +-  python manage_prod.py celeryd --beat --concurrency=1