Rate command

[Harvy66]

What's this "rate" command that is using 100% of a core and making my CPU run at 60c? I should adjust my fan scaling in my bios. Meh.

last pid:  7075;  load averages:  1.00,  1.00,  1.00  up 14+22:18:05    17:07:43
149 processes: 6 running, 113 sleeping, 30 waiting

Mem: 22M Active, 178M Inact, 325M Wired, 988K Cache, 1481M Buf, 7304M Free
Swap:

PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE  C  TIME    WCPU COMMAND
97153 root    103    0 15156K  2236K CPU1    1 276.9H 100.00% /usr/local/bin/rate -i igb0 -nlq 1 -Aba 20
  11 root    155 ki31    0K    64K RUN    2 283.9H  82.86% [idle{idle: cpu2}]
  11 root    155 ki31    0K    64K CPU3    3 286.5H  78.27% [idle{idle: cpu3}]
  11 root    155 ki31    0K    64K RUN    1 289.6H  77.39% [idle{idle: cpu1}]
  11 root    155 ki31    0K    64K CPU0    0 280.5H  65.67% [idle{idle: cpu0}]
96017 root      24    0  223M 34832K piperd  3  0:00  0.20% php-fpm: pool lighty (php-fpm)
  12 root    -60    -    0K  480K WAIT    0 127:37  0.00% [intr{swi4: clock}]
  15 root    -16    -    0K    16K -      0 102:42  0.00% [rand_harvestq]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    0  45:50  0.00% [intr{irq269: igb1:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    2  42:43  0.00% [intr{irq271: igb1:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    1  41:37  0.00% [intr{irq270: igb1:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    0  40:41  0.00% [intr{irq264: igb0:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    3  40:18  0.00% [intr{irq272: igb1:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    1  39:07  0.00% [intr{irq265: igb0:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    3  38:56  0.00% [intr{irq267: igb0:que}]
  12 root    -92    -    0K  480K WAIT    2  35:20  0.00% [intr{irq266: igb0:que}]
32183 root      20    0 91760K 40472K kqread  2  21:04  0.00% /usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /var/etc/light
    5 root    -16    -    0K    16K pftm    0  15:17  0.00% [pf purge]

edit:

I have not rebooted or killed it yet in case someone wants me to do something.

[heper]

FreeBSD net-mgmt : rate
A traffic analysis command-line utility

Rate is a swiss-army-knife command-line traffic analysis tool, designed
to help a network administrator to see what is happening at a router at
the moment. Unlike tcpdump(1), rate uses statistical and stream-oriented
methods, and will never produce an output stream at a speed beyond human
perception. The output is less accurate, however. Rate features four
different operating modes, designed to perform the following tasks:
estimating overall traffic rates, determining nodes generating the
highest traffic, determining connections and flows generating the highest
traffic and extracting strings from packets.

something like ntop or darkstat running?

[Harvy66]

Nope

I did find some hots from 2013 about rate being used for RRD statistics gathering or something. Someone mentioned it randomly going "crazy" and eating CPU. This is why I haven't rebooted or anything yet in case someone wants me to run some commands to find more info.

[Harvy66]

I finally rebooted and turned up my BIOS fan settings to be more aggressive. 100% fan speed by 55c instead of 70c for my CPU and 50c for my system…. I can start to hear the fan now... /cry

[phil.davis]

That is the Status->Traffic Graph collecting data to fill the table of Host/In/Out bandwidth hogs.
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/blob/master/usr/local/www/bandwidth_by_ip.php#L100
It should not use much CPU on average, but it does run every 1 second to gather a short sample of network activity.
Somehow your process is in a CPU knot - it has used 276.9 hours of CPU!

[jtechsense]

I just ran into this on pfsense 2.2.5..  I did leave the traffic graph open in a tab for a long time.

Here's what it looked like:

ps aux

USER      PID  %CPU %MEM    VSZ    RSS TT  STAT STARTED        TIME COMMAND
root      11    302.4  0.0          0        64  -  RL  27Nov15 201836:18.56 [idle]
root    55232 100.0  0.0  15156    2364  -  R    23Dec15  17843:35.14 /usr/local/bin/rate -i igb0 -nlq 1 -Aba 20 -R -c 192.168.1.0/24
..

So I killed it and the CPU usage went back to down to normal..

kill -s KILL

[liontaur]

Sorry to drag up an old thread but i'm experiencing the same thing on 2.3.1-RELEASE-p5 which is running on an SG-2440. Rate is taking up 100% of a core and navigating the pfsense GUI via web browser is sluggish. I ran ps and it came back with:

USER    PID  %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TT  STAT STARTED        TIME COMMAND
root  34851 100.0  0.1  15028  2244  -  R     6Jul16 11071:28.23 /usr/local/bin/rate -i igb1 -nlq 1 -Aba 20 -R -c 172.16.0.0/22

I do always have a browser tab opened to the dashboard and another tab opened to the LAN traffic graph. Is there a way to prevent rate from taking up an entire core?

I have another pfsense, same version but on a Supermicro 5018A-FTN4. And I have a browser tab opened to the dashboard and another tab for the LAN traffic graph on it and it's behaving fine. I ran a ps on it and here's what it came back with:

USER     PID  %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TT  STAT STARTED         TIME COMMAND
root   68720   0.0  0.0  17000  2528  -  S     1:35PM      0:00.00 sh -c /usr/local/bin/rate -i igb1 -nlq 1 -Aba 20 -R -c 192.168.0.0/20 | tr "|" " " | awk '{ printf "%s:%s:%s:%s:%s\\n", $1,  $2,  $4,  $6,  $8 }'

Thanks,

Mark

[jimp]

You can rename the rate command so it doesn't run. I haven't heard of that being an issue on 2.3.x on any hardware, though.

mv /usr/local/bin/rate /usr/local/bin/rate-disabled

[pan_2]

Just curious - why not chmod -x ?

[jimp]

@pan_2:

Just curious - why not chmod -x ?

That should work, too. I prefer to rename though.