Hi,

A colleague of mine reported a memory usage issue with the bird daemon last year, which resulted in a request for a core dump, but we never followed it up.

I'd like to re-open this discussion and see if anything can be done to fix it.

I'll provide some information regarding a production environment, where the problem is most obvious. But any further details and diagnostics will have to come from our lab environment.

Please note, in production we mostly run 1.5, but in the lab we are on 1.6, however we see the same symptoms in both environments on both versions.

The symptoms are twofold, but potentially related - greater than expected memory usage reported by the bird daemon itself for the number of routes, but also massively more memory actually used by the daemon process.

When the process is started, we see "normal" memory usage, which then seems to grow indefinitely in distinct steps, separated by a period of a few hours.

In production, this consumes most of the 32G of memory until the kernel oom-killer to intervenes.

Production:

BIRD 1.5.0 ready.
bird> show memory
BIRD memory usage
Routing tables: 1405 MB
Route attributes: 84 kB
ROA tables: 192 B
Protocols: 45 kB
Total: 1405 MB

bird> show route count
2273 of 2273 routes for 1142 networks

# ps u -p 3441
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
bird 3441 0.1 55.4 18275124 18241540 ? Ssl Aug10 73:39 /usr/sbin/bird -f -u bird -g bird

..so that's ~1.4G reported by bird, and ~18G actually consumed by the process.

Lab:
BIRD 1.6.0 ready.
bird> show mem
BIRD memory usage
Routing tables: 693 MB
Route attributes: 28 kB
ROA tables: 192 B
Protocols: 41 kB
Total: 693 MB

bird> show route count
175 of 175 routes for 91 networks

# ps u -p 29085
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
bird 29085 0.0 14.9 4994852 4915032 ? Ssl Aug05 19:41 /usr/sbin/bird -f -u bird -g bird

..so that's ~ 0.7G reported by bird, and ~5G actually consumed by the process.

I also attached the bird config from the lab.

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks.

Cheers,

Just

Notice: This email is confidential and may contain copyright material of members of the Ocado Group. Opinions and views expressed in this message may not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the members of the Ocado Group.

If you are not the intended recipient, please notify us immediately and delete all copies of this message. Please note that it is your responsibility to scan this message for viruses.

Fetch and Sizzle are trading names of Speciality Stores Limited and Fabled is a trading name of Marie Claire Beauty Limited, both members of the Ocado Group.

References to the “Ocado Group” are to Ocado Group plc (registered in England and Wales with number 7098618) and its subsidiary undertakings (as that expression is defined in the Companies Act 2006) from time to time. The registered office of Ocado Group plc is Titan Court, 3 Bishops Square, Hatfield Business Park, Hatfield, Herts. AL10 9NE.