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