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Bug #16347

closed

Memory leak in ``pftop``

Added by Danilo Zrenjanin 2 months ago. Updated 2 months ago.

Status:
Closed
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category:
Diagnostics
Target version:
2.8.0
Start date:
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Plus Target Version:
25.07
Release Notes:
Default
Affected Version:
Affected Architecture:

Description

Leaving `pftop` running in an interactive session for an extended period (several hours to days) causes continuous memory usage growth, leading to a point where kernel triggers OOM (Out-of-Memory) kill to save the system. Despite having 16GB RAM, this was enough to put the system in critical state. Suricata and other services were stable and consistent in memory usage.

Reproduction Steps

1. Open terminal or SSH into pfSense+
2. Run `pftop` and leave it running for several hours to days (especially with high session counts)
3. Monitor memory usage (`top`, `vmstat`, `swapinfo`)
4. System eventually reaches high memory usage (98–100%)
5. Kernel fails to reclaim memory and force kills `pftop`

Expected Behavior

`pftop` should:
- Not consume growing memory over time
- Be safely reclaimable by kernel
- Not lead to system-wide instability

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 #1

Updated by Jim Pingle 2 months ago

  • Project changed from pfSense Plus to pfSense
  • Category changed from Diagnostics to Diagnostics
  • Status changed from New to Feedback
  • Affected Plus Version deleted (24.11)

Can you reproduce this on a system running CE 2.8.0, Plus 25.07, or later? There was an upstream fix in pftop for a memory leak in their 0.12 release from March (after 24.11, before 2.8.0), and CE 2.8.0 and Plus 25.07 builds have pftop 0.13.

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 #2

Updated by Lev Prokofev 2 months ago

Jim Pingle wrote in #note-1:

Can you reproduce this on a system running CE 2.8.0, Plus 25.07, or later? There was an upstream fix in pftop for a memory leak in their 0.12 release from March (after 24.11, before 2.8.0), and CE 2.8.0 and Plus 25.07 builds have pftop 0.13.

I can't reproduce it on 25.07, pftop is running 12 hours, no memory leakage detected so far.

tested on:

25.07-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Tue Jul 22 23:24:00 MSK 2025
FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT

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 #3

Updated by Jordan G 2 months ago

not seeing this either so far with 25.07 and an existing config

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 #4

Updated by Jim Pingle 2 months ago

  • Subject changed from pftop causes memory leak / OOM Kill when left running for extended periods to Memory leak in ``pftop``
  • Status changed from Feedback to Closed
  • Target version set to 2.8.0
  • Plus Target Version set to 25.07
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