Hi,

 

Has anybody got any advice for the following problem? As I'm seeing some very 
odd behaviour with the auditd daemon in RHEL5.2 where under heavy system load 
the auditd process doesn't free any resources until all memory is consumed and 
the kernel kills the process with an Out Of Memory error.

 

The system I have is a heavily customised RHEL5.2 with some fairly stringent 
auditing rules specified, the config is attached. In addition to these rules 
there will be various SELinux AVCs being raised as well as events from my own 
software so the auditing system is kept quite busy, see the attached report.txt 
for the aureport summary .

 

I can reproduce this behaviour consistently by generating a heavy system load 
(CPU 100% usage) while also generating a significant number of audit events. 
After about 20 minutes the auditd process will have grown from 8Mb of memory to 
around 1Gb;

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND    

3037 root      16  -3 2763m 921m   16 S  3.7 91.2   0:26.49 auditd

If the system is kept busy eventually auditd will consume all the memory 
available on the system and the process be killed by the kernel with an Out Of 
Memory error.

 

On the face of it this would seem to be a memory leak within auditd however 
once auditd has started to consume resources if the system load is reduced and 
therefore the number and frequency of audit events is reduced then auditd will 
free this memory and return back to the 8Mb memory usage. So it would seem that 
while auditd is kept busy it keeps hold of any resources it is allocating. 
Unfortunately I have systems that run under the level of load required to cause 
this issue fairly frequently.

 

The system is RHEL 5.2 and audit is version audit-1.7.17-3.

 

Regards

Ross Kirk

Software Engineer

N E X O R

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Attachment: audit.rules
Description: audit.rules

Attachment: auditd.conf
Description: auditd.conf

Number of changes in configuration: 301
Number of changes to accounts, groups, or roles: 0
Number of logins: 13
Number of failed logins: 14
Number of authentications: 24
Number of failed authentications: 2
Number of users: 2
Number of terminals: 15
Number of host names: 5
Number of executables: 120
Number of files: 348742
Number of AVC's: 23361
Number of MAC events: 1
Number of failed syscalls: 1101653
Number of anomaly events: 0
Number of responses to anomaly events: 0
Number of crypto events: 0
Number of keys: 0
Number of process IDs: 22880
Number of events: 1521282
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