[ovs-discuss] ovs-vswitchd memory consumption behavior

[Fernando Casas Schössow]

Hi,

I'm running OVS on a Qemu/KVM virtualization host for a while now. The virtualization host is running around 12 VMs without a huge network activity. The OVS configuration is very simple, nothing fancy. Four VLANs, two bond ports with two slaves each, three internal ports and then one port for each VM (I can provide the output of ovs-vsctl show if needed).

Recently I noticed that when the ovs-vswitchd process starts it's consuming around 10MB of RAM but after  two weeks (the server is running 24x7) ovs-vswitchd can be consuming around 2.5GB of RAM and after let's say a month or so it will be around 5GB or even a bit more.

I'm new to OVS but in other circumstances I will suspect of either a memory leak or a misconfiguration.
Is this normal behavior? Should ovs-vswitchd continously allocate more and more memory without ever releasing it?

What I'm doing now to keep ovs-vswitchd memory usage under control is to restart the service every couple of weeks but this is far from ideal.

Please find below some additional information about my setup and feel free to ask for any other details I may have missed.

OVS command line: /usr/sbin/ovs-vswitchd --pidfile=/var/run/openvswitch/ovs-vswitchd.pid --detach --monitor --mlockall unix:/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock
OVS version: 2.10.1
Distro: Alpine Linux 3.9.0
Linux kernel version: 4.19.18
Qemu version: 3.1
Libvirt version: 4.10.0

Thanks in advance.

Fernando
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