Intermittent High Memory Usage on Catalyst 6500

[1581curran]

Subj: Intermittent high memory usage on Catalyst 6500

Hi,

We are running a Catalyst 6500 series router with the following system software: 

Cisco IOS Software, s72033_rp Software (s72033_rp-ADVIPSERVICESK9-M), Version 15.1(2)SY1, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc4)

Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport

Copyright (c) 1986-2013 by Cisco Systems, Inc.

Compiled Thu 28-Nov-13 13:43 by prod_rel_team

ROM: System Bootstrap, Version 12.2(17r)S4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)

BOOTLDR: Cisco IOS Software, s72033_rp Software (s72033_rp-ADVIPSERVICESK9-M), Version 15.1(2)SY1, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc4)

Lately we have been seeing spikes in memory usage up to 98%. Memory load on this machine is normally in the 20-25% range.

We've had our network engineer investigate this and he is unsure of the cause. We're not seeing any unusual traffic into or out of this router during times of high memory usage.

This has been happening once every day or two for about the last week. We start to see increased latency and dropped packets, and the only solution that has worked is restarting the router. This is less than ideal.

My question for you is this: are there any known issues with this hardware or software that could explain the problem? Should we try updating system software?

I'd appreciate any insights you have on this.

[Leo Laohoo]

Good, the IOS version is stated in the thread.  

Kindly post the complete output to the command "sh proc cpu sort | ex 0.00".

[Vinit Jain]

Could you please post the below outputs:

- show mem statistics

If you are about to reload the router, then i would recommend to collect the below command in a scheduled maintenance window as this command can be service disrupting:

- show memory debug leak chunk

This command will help understand which process (if any) is causing a memory leak on the router.

Also, if its not a memory leak, you may want to look at your monitoring system to see when the memory utilization started increasing. If you can find that from the graph, you may also want to look for any changes that occurred on the router or in the network that could possibly increase the scale on the router and causing increased memory utilization.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Vinit