This smells of a runaway hostentry resolution cycle or something like that. Do you have some “minimal reproducer” then, which causes this godzilla to emerge? It is probably not easy to fix but we’d like to try.

Thanks!

Maria

I was also skeptical about the memory usage of BIRD 3.x compared to BIRD 2.x. In my case, memory consumption roughly doubled. I raised this several times on this mailing list as well as in private messages, but the issue was either ignored or attributed to FreeBSD.

Regarding possible memory leaks, after about one month of uptime, BIRD 3.3.1 with four (2 x dual-stack) BGP full-view sessions and one OSPFv3 session currently shows:

top
PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE     SIZE     RES STATE    C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
4397 root          2   7    0  1987M  1877M select   2 120.1H   7.81% bird

bird3-3.3.1                    Dynamic multithreaded IP routing daemon
BIRD 3.3.1 ready.
bird> show memory
BIRD memory usage
                  Effective    Overhead
Routing tables:    311.6 MB     27.4 MB
Route attributes:  232.5 MB     17.5 MB
Protocols:        4847.1 kB     72.7 kB
Current config:     73.5 kB   1400.0 B
Standby memory:      0.0 B      35.2 MB
Total:             549.1 MB     80.3 MB

Active pages:      450.1 MB
Kept free pages:    35.2 MB
Cold free pages:  1173.5 MB
Hot page cache depleted while in RCU: 1266139

Could someone explain what the continuously increasing "Cold free pages" value represents, and why there is such a large difference (around 710 MB after one month) in the memory reported by show memory and the SIZE/RES values reported by top(1) on FreeBSD as well?

Is this expected behavior, or could it indicate that memory is being retained but not released back to the operating system?

Cheers

Marek Zarychta