What will happen when ASA memory hits 100%?

[roward]

Hi there, 

We have an ASA 5555 HA pair that is running at 92% Memory utilisation. On the current trend it will hit 100% memory utilisation in 6 weeks. CPU is OK at 20%-50%, 35% average.

What is likely to happen when the device hits 100% memory utilisation? Will we get a graceful or catastrophic reduction in performance? 

The memory usage is mostly down to far too many rules... we know what needs fixing, but change processes can be slow, so I just wanted to know what happens if we don't reduce the rule set in time. 

Kind regards, 

Rob. 

[Leo Laohoo]

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@roward wrote:

What is likely to happen when the device hits 100% memory utilisation? 

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The appliance will crash.  Spectacularly.

Raise a TAC Case.  It sounds like the ASA is running a firmware with a memory leak bug.

[roward]

Thanks - Cisco suggest the high memory is due to having >2 million rules (!) rather than a memory leak.