OSS + ELC EU 2026

Your AI agent is Dory. Every conversation it wakes up unable to remember a thing , so you, Marlin, re-explain everything every turn. Four open-source memory systems promise to fix that: Cognee, MemOS, Honcho, and MemPalace. But which architecture actually pays off in tokens, dollars, and resolved tasks?
This talk runs two experiments. First, we benchmark all four backends head-to-head on a single Kubernetes substrate , same harness, same workloads, same OpenTelemetry Collector and rank them by token efficiency, cost per resolved task, and recall under contradiction.
Then we test the question most teams haven't asked: is running an agent with memory worth it at all? We measure two real OSS agent frameworks , kagent (CNCF Sandbox) and sympozium with their built-in memory turned on, then turned off. Real workloads, real numbers.
None of the four backends ships first-party OTel today; the Helm chart, OTel pipeline, and upstream PRs are how we close that gap for the ecosystem.