Hard Crashing - Out of Memory

xxGBHxx

Hi,

I rearranged my rules today to sort out a few other problems I was having and also to clear out some of the 6 year old crud in my rulesets. Since then I've been getting the following errors first "randomly" and now every time I click on my OpenVPN tab in Rules.

The firewall is a VM and it has 6GB ram allocated to it of which it's currently sitting at about 30% (so 2GB). I'm guessing I need to set a larger buffer somewhere but I've been through every forum post and setting on the firewall and nothing has made a difference. The error is:

Crash report begins.  Anonymous machine information:

amd64
11.2-RELEASE-p6
FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p6 #3 518496b29ae(RELENG_2_4_4): Wed Dec 12 07:41:44 EST 2018     root@buildbot2.nyi.netgate.com:/build/ce-crossbuild-244/obj/amd64/ZfGpH5cd/build/ce-crossbuild-244/pfSense/tmp/FreeBSD-src/sys/pfSense

Crash report details:

PHP Errors:
[13-Mar-2019 18:43:03 Europe/London] PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 375427072 bytes) in /usr/local/www/firewall_rules.php on line 88
[13-Mar-2019 18:43:03 Europe/London] PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 375386112 bytes) in Unknown on line 0

Anyone have any idea why it's doing this and/or what I need to change to allocate more RAM to whatever process is running out of memory?

G

KOM

My instance runs several packages and it works just fine with 2GB RAM total, of which 26% is used. You have some sort of problem.

Which packages, if any, are you running?

xxGBHxx

Thanks but nothing exciting.

ACME which I've never used
Lightsquid which is configured and working
Open-VM-Tools
pfBlockerNG set up with most of the blocklists (only about 20 lists and none of them more than half a million IP's)
snort set up with a relatively small selection of rules (I'd say about half)
squid set up as a transparent proxy
System_Patches which I've never used

But as I said it's not "out of memory" on the main status page, far from it. Just don't know where to look or what to tweak.

G

KOM

You have pretty much every heavy package installed. Squid can suck up amazing gobs of RAM all by itself. Squid is practically useless for caching these days, so unless you're using it for URL filtering with squidguard, I would remove it. If you definitely need squid, what do you have set for its Memory Cache Size?

xxGBHxx

Yeh I have been considering removing Squid for that reason.

That said, as I mentioned I have 6GB allocated to the FW and it's hovering between 30-40% according to the status page. I've not yet seen it go over 3GB used so it's barely touching the sides.

I should mention this is just for my home system, so it's just 3 people hitting it on a 80Mbit broadband line so it's not exactly getting hammered. It also has shared use of a Intel I7 2600 processor which sits at about 45% utilization. I don't think the resources available to the VM are the issue.

The Memory Cache Size is set to 1024 so well below the 50% maximum size. Unless these applications are using RAM that isn't reported on the Dashboard then it's no where near limiting.

Thanks again for having a try though.

G

stephenw10

@xxgbhxx said in Hard Crashing - Out of Memory:

536870912

It's exhausting the 512MB limit for php processes. It appears to be trying to allocate 375MB:

	printf("<a href=\"diag_dump_states.php?ruleid=%s\" data-toggle=\"popover\" data-trigger=\"hover focus\" title=\"%s\" ",
	    $rulesid, gettext("States details"));

So when you are mousing over something in the ruleset? Do you have huge aliases? A very large number of states?

Steve

xxGBHxx

I don't have a large number of states - I've not noticed it goes over 1000 total for the entire firewall. I'm not sure what you'd call huge aliases but within Pf none of the aliases are over 20 IP's. In PfBlockerNG I've got a number (17) of blocklists defined and the largest one when I do a refresh is about 80,000 IP's so tiny on the scale of lists.

I've just gone and cycled through the interfaces it seems to be my OpenVPN interface that's causing the issue. Even when I just click on it to browse to it that's when it locks up and it's now giving me a 504 error. Thing is I can't get into the GUI to see what rules are there that might be causing the problems. How can I get to the rules and disable/delete to see if that solves the problem?

G

xxGBHxx

Ok this time now that it's re-started I get

PHP errors

    PHP ERROR: Type: 1, File: /usr/local/www/firewall_rules.php, Line: 88, Message: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 375427072 bytes) @ 2019-03-13 18:43:03
    PHP ERROR: Type: 1, File: /usr/local/www/firewall_rules.php, Line: 491, Message: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 532692992 bytes) @ 2019-03-13 20:31:43

General

    Unresolvable source alias 'Internal_SUbnets' for rule 'OpenVPN wizard' @ 2019-03-13 23:00:09
    Unresolvable source alias 'Internal_SUbnets' for rule 'OpenVPN wizard' @ 2019-03-13 23:00:46

So it's clearly those last two lines. As I mentioned when I click on the tab it crashed the firewall so how do I get in there to delete the offending rule. The only range under "Internal_Subnets" is 172.17.10.0/24 so I don't understand why it's causing these problems.

Any ideas?

G

xxGBHxx

Hi,

@stephenw10 any ideas?

Thanks

Gary

Gertjan

@xxgbhxx said in Hard Crashing - Out of Memory:

The only range under "Internal_Subnets" is 172.17.10.0/24 so I don't understand why it's causing these problems.

This particular alias is just the drip that overflows the bucket.

A radical test to check if you are on the right track : tell PHP it can use more memory. Do this by changing the php.ini file.

Edit : etc/rc.php_ini_setup - line 181 - add " memory_limit = 256M "

....
; File generated from /etc/rc.php_ini_setup
memory_limit = 256M
...

and restart PHP using console option 16.

Now test.

xxGBHxx

@gertjan said in Hard Crashing - Out of Memory:

etc/rc.php_ini_setup

Hi thanks for that.

So I tried 256M and it had no effect. I increased it to 1024M restarting PHP with option 16 both times and it had no effect.

PHP ERROR: Type: 1, File: /usr/local/www/firewall_rules.php, Line: 708, Message: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 375398400 bytes) @ 2019-03-14 14:04:56

It doesn't seem to increase the allowed memory size at all either way.

Any other ideas?

G

Gertjan

Place this 'code' in a file called whatever.php into the GUI webroot (/usr/local/www/) :

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

and open the file like
http://pfsense.yourlan.tld/whatever.php

Check the several occurrences of 'memory' : I can't find 512M (!!) or 536870912 bytes ....
"memory_limit" is the value that should have been changed. With 6 Gb you could even make that value bigger.

Btw :

@xxgbhxx said in Hard Crashing - Out of Memory:

(only about 20 lists and none of them more than half a million IP's)

Serious ??
You really ask unbound, the DNS server, to restart with lists close to half a million of IP's ??
Woooow.

xxGBHxx

@gertjan

memory_limit = 1024M for both the local and master value

Not sure what your reference to DNS means. The lists are all IP's so wouldn't go anywhere near DNS.

Thanks again though

G

KOM

He might have meant pfBlocker, not Unbound.

Gertjan

@kom said in Hard Crashing - Out of Memory:

He might have meant pfBlocker, not Unbound.

Or both.
pfBlocker populate lists parsed by unbound.

(I guess it's time that I replay with pfBlocker - but don't do what to block, or who ...)

stephenw10

Or more likely that pfBlocker can add lists to both but DNSBL does not have to be used.

I believe this is the only line that would need changing:
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/64d2dd619973fa986389de2b5db43b0043c5ddd6/src/etc/inc/config.inc#L43
But I have not tried it and you should only do so as a test. It should not be trying to allocate that ammount of RAM to open the page.

Steve

xxGBHxx

@kom

Ah

pfBlocker handles lists many millions of IP's in size - well according to the 100's of posts I've read. Many people use much larger IP lists than I do.

Either way it's not going anywhere near Unbound as the lists I use are all IP address so there is no resolution to be done unless I'm missing something obvious.

Either way the firewall is no where near ram, disk or CPU limits.

G

xxGBHxx

@stephenw10

Do I need to do a firewall re-start for it to pick up the change?

G

stephenw10

You would likely need to restart php and the webgui from the console menu at least. It might require a reboot.

Steve

xxGBHxx

@stephenw10

Increased that value to 2048 and restarted PHP/WEB. Also rebooted. Hasn't allowed me to get into that tab in the GUI as I still get a 504 error however it has now stopped giving me out of memory errors.

One step forwards but I sense no nearer!

Thanks again.

Any other ideas?

G