Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search
    • Register
    • Login

    Memory usage query

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    3 Posts 2 Posters 1.6k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • K
      Keljian
      last edited by

      So I've been running pfsense for about 2 weeks now and over the last week I've noticed that it has slowly been using more and more memory on the machine.

      it started about 35% then a day later it was 55, then another day it was 65, another day 78, another day passed and it was at 80%, and now it's about 91%. It has started bouncing around 88-91%

      I have snort, squid, lightsquid and nmap installed.

      Snort is just set up with basic settings.. squid 250mb ram, 10 gig hard drive space (space is not at a premium, 100gig would be fine)  - about 250k connections

      Should I be concerned about anything?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • B
        Bern
        last edited by

        That's absolutely fine, especially with that mix of services running.

        The operating system will automatically and dynamically cache pages of data that have been recently read from/written to disk.

        These cached pages are the most likely cause of the increase that you cite.

        If the operating system DIDN'T do this, the counter-argument would be "why does the operating system constantly read from disk when all that memory is free and could be used as a cache?"  ;D

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • K
          Keljian
          last edited by

          THANKS!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • First post
            Last post
          Copyright 2025 Rubicon Communications LLC (Netgate). All rights reserved.