FMC: High memory and swap utilization

swscco001 — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 15:51:45 GMT

Hello everybody,

our monitoring system showed a warning because high memory and
swap utilization of customers FMC 6.6.0.1 (running on VMware).

I went to the expert mode and the top command showed the following:

root@M-Firesight:/Volume/home/admin# top
top - 08:04:15 up 90 days, 22:05, 1 user, load average: 0.86, 1.15, 1.18
Tasks: 276 total, 1 running, 227 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.5%us, 3.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 88.3%id, 1.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%
Mem: 32944304k total, 30403448k used, 2540856k free, 186828k buffers <==========
Swap: 6891336k total, 6193924k used, 697412k free, 6293560k cached <==========

The customer increased the the memory in VMware to 48 GByte but the
issue persists after some days:

top - 15:40:03 up 2 days, 20:35, 1 user, load average: 0.81, 0.73, 0.62
Tasks: 219 total, 1 running, 171 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 3.6%us, 1.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 94.8%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 49459308k total, 47937576k used, 1521732k free, 241272k buffers <==========
Swap: 7715840k total, 275456k used, 7440384k free, 26232684k cached <==========

Then I updated the FMC to rel. 6.6.1 but this did not solve the issue too.

The FMC does not show any problem at the usage. Seems that certain processes
do no free memory again. Full top command output attached.

My questions to you:

1. What can I do to identify the process(es) that cause this?

2. Could this be a known issue (bug) even after update to rel. 6.6.1?
3. Could the FMC misconfigured that it consume such high amount of memory?

I would like to hear your ideas.

Every hint is welcome!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Bye
R.

Re: FMC: High memory and swap utilization

Oliver Kaiser — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 19:17:49 GMT

It's not bug - it is a feature. FMC allocates the available memory to its processes, but that allocation does not neccessarily mean that you are running into issues with memory usage.

If you are looking for "real" data I would suggest check the "Memory Usage - Memory Test" monitor in health monitoring or check your resource statistics at https://fmc01.example.lab/status/host.cgi

Hope that helps

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FMC: High memory and swap utilization

Re: FMC: High memory and swap utilization