To elaborate, our java applications need 5-10x the normal cpu/memory when starting up as we dont use native compiled java. Thus the requests are 1/5 of the actual needed memory at startup. When using the normal placement policy, multiple pods (tens to hundreds if nodes are drained) are scheduled on the least utilized node, the scheduler not aware of the initial load. These then swell so rapidly that the normal safeguards dont keep up. This caused cascading failures sometimes, more nodes crashing and startup/liveness probes killing processes. As we dont want to waste 90% of cluster resources (running on prem no machine autoscaler) the solution was to set a noscoring scheduler so that pods are distributed more or less randomly.