CRON job hung with high CPU useage

gburkett05

Hello all,
I hope I'm providing enough information, if not just let me know.
I'm new to PFSense but I've been getting better, and just last week I began using DNSBL to block advertisements across my network.
Everything was running smoothly until this morning, when everything seemed… slower...
Viewing PFBlockerNG's logs show the service is stuck on a CRON task involving DNSBL, "top -aSH" shows multiple CRON instances hogging CPU cycles, and the home interface shows 100% usage.
I know my system isn't ridiculously powerful, but it should be strong enough to blacklist domains and cache downloads, so what gives? Has anyone else experienced this?
Thanks for the help
![2016-11-22 (1).png](/public/imported_attachments/1/2016-11-22 (1).png)
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![2016-11-22 (2).png](/public/imported_attachments/1/2016-11-22 (2).png)
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2016-11-22.png_thumb

doktornotor

Don't enable any of the fancy deduplication and other features in pfBlockerNG.

gburkett05

Deduplication is not turned on. Could it be anything else? Should I change the Download Failure Threshold to a value below unlimited? Could that be what's causing it to hang?

gburkett05

Alright, so I disabled PFBlockerNG, rebooted the system, then re-enabled it, and now I have some context:
===[ DNSBL Process ]================================================
Missing DNSBL stats and/or Unbound DNSBL conf file - Rebuilding

Does this have to do with custom DNSBL blacklists and should remove them/start from scratch?

BBcan177

Not sure why it created so many duplicate "cron" processes, but I would suggest either a reboot or killing the duplicate "cron" pids:

ps auxww | grep pfb

then

kill -9

Follow that with a "Force Update" and see if it completes. Does the Box have any issues resolving DNS queries?

gburkett05

Thanks, that dropped my CPU usage enough for me to be able to interact with the GUI.
I'm going to uninstall PFBlockerNG and reinstall with a Spamhaus blacklist instead, perhaps it was having issues with my current blacklists
I have had no issues browsing or using my network other than the fact that it was pretty slow, so I don't think I had any DNS problems

simoism

I'm seeing the exact same issue on my system, which has been running fine for around 1 year up until (I would guess) a couple of days ago.

Killing the offending PIDs returns the system to normal, until the cron runs again.

Offending process:

/usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/www/pfblockerng/pfblockerng.php cron

Cron entry (should this even be there, if pfBlockerNG is already running?!):

0	*	*	*	*	root	/usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/www/pfblockerng/pfblockerng.php cron >> /var/log/pfblockerng/pfblockerng.log 2>&1

Reinstalling pfBlockerNG hasn't resolved the issue.

Top:

last pid: 15767;  load averages:  1.04,  0.89,  0.68  up 0+15:39:23    23:08:19
147 processes: 4 running, 128 sleeping, 15 waiting

Mem: 240M Active, 318M Inact, 253M Wired, 1684K Cache, 165M Buf, 150M Free
Swap: 1024M Total, 11M Used, 1013M Free, 1% Inuse

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME    WCPU COMMAND
19147 root     102    0   224M 29644K RUN      8:11 100.00% /usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/www/pfblockerng
    0 root     -16    -     0K   176K swapin  32.2H   0.00% [kernel{swapper}]
   11 root     155 ki31     0K    16K RUN    128:51   0.00% [idle]
14950 root      20    0 21624K  4560K select   5:26   0.00% /usr/local/sbin/openvpn --config /var/etc/ope
13877 root      20    0 21624K  4528K select   4:33   0.00% /usr/local/sbin/openvpn --config /var/etc/ope
    0 root     -92    -     0K   176K -        0:58   0.00% [kernel{em0 taskq}]
   12 root     -60    -     0K   240K WAIT     0:38   0.00% [intr{swi4: clock}]
   12 root     -72    -     0K   240K WAIT     0:36   0.00% [intr{swi1: netisr 0}]
    0 root     -92    -     0K   176K -        0:22   0.00% [kernel{em1 taskq}]
80302 unbound   20    0   454M   434M kqread   0:14   0.00% /usr/local/sbin/unbound -c /var/unbound/unbou
85221 root      20    0   101M  4704K select   0:10   0.00% /usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd -c /usr/local/share/v
   15 root     -16    -     0K    16K -        0:06   0.00% [rand_harvestq]
    7 root     -16    -     0K    16K pftm     0:04   0.00% [pf purge]
86254 root      52   20 17000K  2180K wait     0:04   0.00% /bin/sh /var/db/rrd/updaterrd.sh
63232 root      23    0   224M 29964K nanslp   0:03   0.00% /usr/local/bin/php -f /usr/local/pkg/pfblocke
85597 dhcpd     20    0 24812K 12516K select   0:02   0.00% /usr/local/sbin/dhcpd -user dhcpd -group _dhc
78154 root      20    0 15012K  2192K nanslp   0:02   0.00% [dpinger{dpinger}]
78478 root      20    0 15012K  2196K nanslp   0:02   0.00% [dpinger{dpinger}]

BBcan177

See the following:
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=102470.msg671811#msg671811

simoism

@BBcan177:

See the following:
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=102470.msg671811#msg671811

That seems to have fixed it. Thanks!