RAM usage is rising continuously

Hi Andrew,

I just need to confirm something please.

Windows Server 2003 + BWM 2.9.1 ran for 23 days.
Ram Usage: 14-15MB, never seems to go higher than 18MB.


Windows Server 2012 R2 + BWM 3.1.6 running for almost 7 days.
Ram Usage: 280MB and growing at rate of 30-40MB per Day and never drops, just rises.


I am using both with the exact same rule-set, on the same network, currently testing 3.1.6 before I buy it.
So the 2003 server is currently offline as the 2012 server is in it's place.

Now my question is, I have run 2.9.1 once for over 300 days without a reboot and never encountered any problems I have also never seen the ram usage go over 18MB.

In 3.1.6 I can understand the RAM usage being higher with all the new features, I am just concerned that number in 3.1.6 just keeps climbing.
What will happen when I get to 4GB after 100 Days or 8GB after 200 Days of up-time? (I have 8GB of RAM in the Server)
Does 3.1.6 have any recovery or refresh procedure should it exhaust all available RAM?

I am running it in production to stress test, and keeping a close eye, ready to switch back to the old server in case something goes wrong.
So far so good, everything seems to be running flawlessly, but the RAM usage has me concerned.

I'd like to see your entire ruleset from version 3.1.6. You can save to a DB file, compress and e-mail me through this link.

As far as I can tell there aren't any memory leaks, but you may have a cache building up or something like that. With your ruleset I can see what features are used and where the growing memory usage might come from.

Hi Andrew,

I have sent my Backup of the rule set.

Thank you

I have reviewed your ruleset and found two features in use that could potentially consume memory in a long run:

• P2P filter in the P2P Off-Peak rule. This filter uses the open source NDPI library that allocates on its own and may be a reason of this growth.
• Using domain names in some rules. When domain names are in use, BM maintains a cache of what IP address maps to what domain name. With a number of users constantly browsing, the cache will grow.

The domain names cache is cleaned up periodically and the entries that have been there longer than 60 x DNS TTL are purged. I am not sure how exactly this number was chosen, but it's not necessary to keep them for that long. In the worst case scenario where TTL is 86 400 (1 day), the entries would be kept for 2 months! For practical purposes keeping the records for 2 x TTL should be good enough.

Please try the new build with shorter DNS cache expiry time and let me know if the memory consumption pattern changes. If not, try also turning off the P2P filter, but I think the culprit is the DNS cache and the new build should resolve it.

Hi,

I have been having this issues for years and tried all your solutions.

Only happens on servers above Win2003. Like now my 2008 just went offline after one day, just consumes all memory and crashes. Takes a day or two. I will try latest builds to see if the DNS changes helps.

/J