You've answered your own question, but you are too wedded to your own
certain knowledge that there are only 400-500 hosts.  There aren't.

ANY IP address ntop sees is a host.

A host is a host is a host.

A host is something ntop creates a HostTraffic entry for, i.e. stores
information about.

If there are packets addressed to 200K hosts, then there are 200K hosts.

With --track-local-hosts only, the remote hosts are dumped into 'other'.
But every LOCAL IP seen per your -m definition of what's local, is a
HostTraffic entry.

200K hosts * 2K is 400M of memory.  200K * 12K is 2.4G of memory - it's
going to depend on what ntop sees in those packets as to how much per host
memory it's going to take.


-----Burton

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Behalf Of Stefan Iaru
> Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 2:05 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [Ntop-dev] ntop keeps crashing
>
>
> I see it is running out of memory, but my question is why ? It has 1.5
> GB of RAM, and nothing else besides ntop is running on that box, and
> I've also allocated about 8 GB of swap, of which it usually uses 500 -
> 1000 MB before going down.
>
> I just added 10.0.0.0/8 because I have a number of 10.x.0.0/24
> subnets, and I was lazy about adding them all in. The number of active
> nodes usually reaches 4-500, but the most I've seen ntop track is ~
> 200 000 (I set the trace level to 4 and monitored the logs). I believe
> the number gets that high because of viral infections that cause
> machines to scan inexistent subnets, therefore adding the hosts in
> ntop's database.
>
> I've been modifying the IDLE_PURGE variables, decreasing the time a
> host needs to be idle in order to be deleted and increasing the number
> of hosts that can be removed, but I haven't seen any increase in
> performance, and even though it sometimes deletes 5000 hosts in one go
> (taking forever to do so), memory utilization doesn't go down. I know
> the deletion process is time-consuming, but I was hoping it would help
> some.
>
> Perhaps I am taking the wrong approach, so I would appreciate it if
> you could point me in the right direction, as this tool is saving us a
> lot of time tracking down infected machines/spammers/hackers etc.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Stefan.
>
>
>
> On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:49:49 -0600, Burton M. Strauss III
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > What do you want... it's CLEAR in the log:
> >
> >
> >
> > Nov  9 19:30:09 linux ntop[11437]:   **FATAL_ERROR** malloc(10384) @
> > pbuf.c:122 returned NULL [no more memory?]
> > Nov  9 19:30:09 linux ntop[11437]:   **WARNING** ntop packet
> capture STOPPED
> > Nov  9 19:30:09 linux ntop[11437]:   NOTE: ntop web server remains up
> > Nov  9 19:30:09 linux ntop[11437]:   NOTE: Shutdown gracefully and
> > restart with more memory
> > Nov  9 19:30:09 linux ntop[11437]:   **FATAL_ERROR** malloc(10384) @
> > pbuf.c:122 returned NULL [no more memory?]
> >
> > ntop is running out of memory, and has handled it gracefully.
> Even after
> > the 'crash', the web server should still be up so you can grab
> textinfo.html
> > data and post real memory usage info.
> >
> > If you can't capture it after the 'crash', then setup a cron'ed
> wget of that
> > page to match up to a crash...
> >
> > But the $64? is "How many hosts are you really tracking"? With
> 10.0.0.0/8 as
> > local, it could be HUGE...
> >
> > -----Burton

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