show memory question

[Alarig Le Lay]

Hi,

On one of my routers, I needed to free some RAM temporally, so I shut
all my BGP sessions. With `birdc show memory` I saw that it should have
worked, however htop was still seeing 1.2G used by bird.

 5311 root       20   0 1296M 1220M  1724 S  0.0 61.1 59h01:29 ├─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.conf -
 5314 root       20   0 1296M 1220M  1724 S  0.7 61.1  6h31:09 │  └─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.con

bird> show memory
BIRD memory usage
Routing tables:     49 MB
Route attributes:  842 kB
Protocols:         300 kB
Total:              50 MB


So, I added the `disabled` option to my sessions and restarted bird, and
then birdc and htop were almost consistent.

25724 root       20   0  107M 32600  2224 S  0.7  1.6  0:00.62 ├─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.conf -
25726 root       20   0  107M 32600  2224 S  0.7  1.6  0:00.16 │  └─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.con

bird> show memory
BIRD memory usage
Routing tables:     28 MB
Route attributes:   46 kB
Protocols:         304 kB
Total:              29 MB


When I re-enabled the BGP sessions, the RAM utilisation was a bit lower
(the original process was two months old).

25724 root	 20   0 1147M 1072M  2072 R  1.3 53.7  2:33.80 ├─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.conf -
25726 root	 20   0 1147M 1072M  2072 S  0.7 53.7  0:07.84 │  └─ /usr/sbin/bird -s /run/bird.ctl -c /etc/bird.con

bird> show memory
BIRD memory usage
Routing tables:    399 MB
Route attributes:  528 MB
Protocols:         102 MB
Total:            1029 MB

Perhaps bird thinks that some RAM has been freed while it’s not actually
the case?

-- 
Alarig