On 10.07.2026 at 18:31, Maria Matejka via Bird-users wrote:
I was also skeptical about the memory usage of BIRD 3.x compared to BIRD 2.x. In my case, memory consumption roughly doubled. I raised this several times on this mailing list as well as in private messages, but the issue was either ignored or attributed to FreeBSD.This smells of a runaway hostentry resolution cycle or something like that. Do you have some “minimal reproducer” then, which causes this godzilla to emerge? It is probably not easy to fix but we’d like to try.Thanks! Maria
Regarding possible memory leaks, after about one month of uptime, BIRD 3.3.1 with four (2 x dual-stack) BGP full-view sessions and one OSPFv3 session currently shows:
|top PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 4397 root 2 7 0 1987M 1877M select 2 120.1H 7.81% bird|
|bird3-3.3.1 Dynamic multithreaded IP routing daemon BIRD 3.3.1 ready. bird> show memory BIRD memory usage Effective Overhead Routing tables: 311.6 MB 27.4 MB Route attributes: 232.5 MB 17.5 MB Protocols: 4847.1 kB 72.7 kB Current config: 73.5 kB 1400.0 B Standby memory: 0.0 B 35.2 MB Total: 549.1 MB 80.3 MB Active pages: 450.1 MB Kept free pages: 35.2 MB Cold free pages: 1173.5 MB Hot page cache depleted while in RCU: 1266139|
Could someone explain what the continuously increasing "Cold free pages" value represents, and why there is such a large difference (around 710 MB after one month) in the memory reported by |show memory|and the |SIZE|/|RES|values reported by |top(1)|on FreeBSD as well?
Is this expected behavior, or could it indicate that memory is being retained but not released back to the operating system?
Cheers Marek Zarychta
OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
