Bug #16347
closedMemory leak in ``pftop``
0%
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
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.
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
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