Ever since upgrading to pfsense 2.1 I have been let down by it. It looks
like there are multiple issues and I am trying to separate them. One is
system suicide by memory gobbling - but it's been a little tricky to
find out why exactly.

It's a system with 512MB RAM, 768M swap.
Mobo Ethernet, Intel system, some old P-III job.
inphy0: <i82562EM 10/100 media interface> PHY 1 on miibus1
inphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow

Realtek NIC (unused)
rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> PHY 0 on miibus0
rlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

Sun 4-port Ethernet NIC
hme0: <Sun HME 10/100 Ethernet> mem 0x46000000-0x46007fff irq 21 at device 0.1 
on pci3
miibus2: <MII bus> on hme0
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus2
ukphy0:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
hme0: [ITHREAD]
[and 3 more of these]

Because of physical location a Brother HL5350DN printer is plugged into
one of the hmeN ports directly. (Using a crossover cable makes no
difference.)

What happens next is the printer's hme interface goes up and down every
few seconds. There are continuous hotplug events too. A gazillion php
processes are spawned. Swap space is used. The system can't respond fast
enough any more and other interfaces go down/up as well. Swap space runs
out. Php etc get killed.

A killall php on the pfsense system gives temporary reprieve.

Essentially, if someone turns the printer on pfsense dies.

Everything was running fine on the same hardware with 2.0 and I don't
think swap space was ever used. I have squid and squidguard running on
it too, but turning those off only changes how fast pfsense dies.

The ntop package was installed and running as well, but top -osize
told me it was using 200M RAM on start so it got uninstalled.

Perhaps freebsd changed, and the php code can't handle it and goes into
run-away memory consumption.

How can I get this pfsense box back into the same reliable and
dependable system it used to be before 2.1?

Any suggestions appreciated. Happy to provide more info too - but where
do I start looking?

Thanks muchly,

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann
http://volker.top.geek.nz/      Please do not CC list postings to me.
_______________________________________________
List mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list

Reply via email to