Hi Michael & Adam,
On 15/12/2025 17:54, Michael Tremer wrote:
Hello Adam,
Thank you for raising this here.
We seem to have two different issues as far as I can see:
1) The directory just keeps growing
2) It is being backed up and completely blows up the size of the backup
No. 2 has been fixed by Adolf. It is however quite interesting that we already
have something in /var/cache in the backup. The intention was to have a valid
set of rules available as soon as a backup is being restored, but I think there
is very little value in this. The rules are probably long expires and will be
re-downloaded again.
I did wonder about why those cached rules tarballs are backed up but wasn't
sure if there was a reasonable explanation I was not aware of. Hence my patch
only dealt with the new issue of the sgh cache.
However, I don't have a problem with removing the whole suricata cache
directory from the backup include list.
We also have a large number of other (also large in disk size) lists around
that we are not backing up, so I would propose that we remove
/var/cache/suricata from the backup entirely. Until we have made a decision on
this, I have merged Adolf’s patch.
Regarding No. 1, this is indeed a problem that Suricata does not clean this up
itself. We could add a simple command that looks a bit like this:
find /var/cache/suricata/ -type f -atime +7 -delete
This would delete all of the cached files that have not been accessed in the
last seven days.
On my system, the entire directory is 1.4 GiB in size and the command would
remove 500 MiB.
Happy to read your thoughts.
Seems a reasonable thing to do. We just need to remember to remove it again
when suricata issue the fix to clean out the cache. The current plan is to have
it released in 8.0.3 and 9.0.0-beta1
It was originally planned for 8.0.2 but this got changed to 8.0.3 as the fix was still marked as
"In Progress". As of 6 days ago the status of the fix was changed to "In
Review" so hopefully it will be available relatively quickly. However there is no estimate
provided of when 8.0.3 should get released.
Regards,
Adolf.
-Michael
On 12 Dec 2025, at 16:49, Adam Gibbons <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
As discussed on the forum
https://community.ipfire.org/t/re-large-backupfile/15346
it appears that Suricata’s new cache optimisation feature is creating a large
number of files under
`/var/cache/suricata/sgh/`, which in some cases causes backup files to grow to
800+ MB.
@Adolf has confirmed that this directory probably should not be included in
backups, as it is automatically regenerated, and I believe he mentioned he is
working on a patch to exclude it from the backup.
However, in the meantime, this directory continues to grow over time. The
upstream Suricata patches to automatically clean or maintain the cache have not
yet been merged, although they may be soon:
https://github.com/OISF/suricata/pull/13850
https://github.com/OISF/suricata/pull/14400
To me this represents a disk-space exhaustion risk on systems with limited
storage. Perhaps we should consider disabling Suricata’s new cache optimisation
feature until automatic cache cleanup/maintenance is available upstream and
included.
Thanks,
Adam
