Odd long-term cycle of memory usage

solarfl4re

Hi,
I've had a pfSense installation running for the past ~5 months and am really enjoying it - I've never used such a capable firewall/router platform. It rocks!
I've run into an odd issue though - the attached RRD graph shows it better. EDIT: Here is a link to a 3-month graph: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yem29abds2p3dmu/Aug_26_PFSENSE_3month_status_rrd_graph_img.png

Is this something to worry about? I have Dansguardian, Squid, pfBlocker, (sometimes) darkstat, and OpenVPN running. 3GBs of RAM. Sometimes performance goes down without explanation; I'll admit that I'm still messing around and tinkering with things, but most of the time things work fine.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
David

kejianshi

Mine does the exact same thing. Never actually maxes out but will climb up to 75% percent memory usage or so, then suddenly drop back down to 30% and just keep going. No resets required or anything - no ill effects. I keep a great big chunk of available ram allocated to squid cache.

I always figured its a harmless effect of the way pfsense marks the memory. Looks like Free and Inactive just trading places.

biggsy

It's alive!

![2013-08-26 20-43-01.png](/public/imported_attachments/1/2013-08-26 20-43-01.png)
![2013-08-26 20-43-01.png_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/2013-08-26 20-43-01.png_thumb)

kejianshi

Looking somewhat like a giant (insert noun of choice).

I was thinking "squid" myself…

doktornotor

@kejianshi:

I was thinking "squid" myself…

Meanwhile, back on topic, the usual answer to this would be "unused RAM == wasted money".

kejianshi

Yeah - I agree. I'd love to be able to keep 75% or so of ram in use at all times, but when I allocate more than 50% or so to squid, pfsense stops playing nice with me. Maybe it will be a different story on 2.1.

solarfl4re

Thanks for the replies, my mind is now at ease!

Maybe I can give Squid some more memory - I was getting some really bad slowdowns where users couldn't browse the web at all, and so as part of my troubleshooting I took memory from Squid. Found out a few days ago that it was actually a Layer7 filter to catch torrent traffic - that was queuing into the ack queue (!!!). All fine… Torrent starts, web browsing grinds to a halt.
Finally got traffic shaping working well enough... PfSense rocks :)

Thanks for the help,
David

kejianshi

Yeah - Don't go too crazy with how much RAM you give squid cache. The Docs recommend no more than 1/2 and I've tried it higher and it was sort of flakey. I'm only running 4GB on my home router. Perhaps if you have 8 or 12 GB or more, you can allocate alot more than half. Not sure.