Techniques are disclosed for memory management in a streams processing environment. Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide a method generally including monitoring, via a streams manager for a distributed application, an amount of memory used by a group of executing processes, and for each group, comparing the amount of memory used by the group against a memory threshold, and determining whether the memory used by the group exceeds a first threshold, and reducing memory usage by the group when the memory used by the group exceeds the first threshold.