MBUF full, is it a problem?

[sathia]

Hello, I noticed today that the MBUF usage has hit its limit.
Apparently the site I'm running under pfsense is having some troubles too, I'd like to know if it would be safe to just

sysctl kern.ipc.nmbclusters=65536

I wouldn't like to reboot the server, is it safe (or useful) to do it via pfsense shell?

thanks you very much

2.0-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Tue Sep 13 17:05:32 EDT 2011

State table size 35573/550000
MBUF Usage 25600/25600
CPU usage 2%
Memory usage 17% (2GB)
Swap 0%
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5450 @ 3.00GHz

[jimp]

kern.ipc.nmbclusters is a loader tunable, and cannot be changed once the system has booted. You probably want to set it even higher than that.

More info here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards

[ssbaksa]

@sathia:

Hello, I noticed today that the MBUF usage has hit its limit.
Apparently the site I'm running under pfsense is having some troubles too, I'd like to know if it would be safe to just

I have expirienced problem like this one when I have used bridge betwen physical net interface and VLAN interface.
When MBUF was full, system failed to route any packet and only restart was helpfull.

Now, I have changed that to bridge betwen two physical interfaces (WAN and DMZ) and under same load, which is substantial one,
I don't have any problems any more.

pfSense version is 1.2.3, hardware is Intel server MB with quad core Xeon and 2 port integrated ETH + one add-on dual port intel gigabit ETH + 2 GB RAM.

Br

Sasa