Tempo queries with large limits can cause large memory allocations which can impact the availability of the service, depending on its deployment strategy.

Mitigation can be done by setting maxresultlimit in the search config, e.g. to 262144 (2^18).

A TraceQL query in Grafana Tempo with a large exemplars hint value can cause the Tempo instance to allocate an excessive amount of memory, resulting in an out-of-memory crash. This could allow an authenticated user to trigger a denial of service against the Tempo service.