[Bro] Bro's limitations with high worker count and memory exhaustion

[Baxter Milliwew]

Switching to jemalloc fixed the stability issue but not the worker count
limitation.

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 7:18 PM, Baxter Milliwew <baxter.milliwew at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Looks like malloc from glibc, default on Ubuntu.  I will try jemalloc and
> others.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 1:03 AM, Jan Grashofer <jan.grashofer at cern.ch>
> wrote:
>
>>  I experienced similar problems (memory gets eaten up quickly and
>> workers crash with segfault) using tcmalloc. Which malloc do you use?
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Jan
>>
>>
>>  ------------------------------
>> *From:* bro-bounces at bro.org [bro-bounces at bro.org] on behalf of Baxter
>> Milliwew [baxter.milliwew at gmail.com]
>> *Sent:* Friday, June 26, 2015 23:03
>> *To:* bro at bro.org
>> *Subject:* [Bro] Bro's limitations with high worker count and memory
>> exhaustion
>>
>>   There's some sort of association between memory exhaustion and a high
>> number of workers.  The poor man's fix would be to purchase new servers
>> with higher CPU speeds as that would reduce the worker count.  Issues with
>> high worker count and/or memory exhaustion appears to be a well know
>> problem based on the mailing list archives.
>>
>>  In the current version of bro-2.4 my previous configuration immediately
>> causes the manager to crash: 15 proxies, 155 workers.  To resolve this I've
>> lowered the count to 10 proxies and 140 workers.  However even with this
>> configuration the manager process will exhaust all memory and crash within
>> about 2 hours.
>>
>>  The manager is threaded; I think this is an issue with the threading
>> behavior between manager, proxies, and workers.  Debugging threading
>> problems is complex and I'm a complete novice.. my current tutorial is
>> using information from a stack overflow thread:
>>
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/981011/c-programming-debugging-with-pthreads
>>
>>  Does anyone else have this problem ?  What have you tried and what do
>> you suggest ?
>>
>>  Thanks
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>   1435347409.458185       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>>   info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] peer sent class "control"
>>
>> 1435347409.458185       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] phase: handshake
>>
>> 1435347409.661085       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] request for unknown event save_results
>>
>> 1435347409.661085       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] registered for event
>> Control::peer_status_response
>>
>> 1435347409.694858       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] peer does not support 64bit PIDs; using
>> compatibility mode
>>
>> 1435347409.694858       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] peer is a Broccoli
>>
>> 1435347409.694858       worker-2-18     parent  -       -       -
>> info    [#10000/10.1.1.1:36994] phase: running
>>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/pipermail/bro/attachments/20150629/9fdafe60/attachment.html