[Oisf-users] Unbalanced load on AFpacket threads

Fernando Sclavo fsclavo at gmail.com
Mon Jun 3 13:34:19 UTC 2013


Hi all!
We are running Suricata 1.4.2 with two Intel x520 cards, connected each one
to the core switches on our datacenter network. The average traffic is
about 1~2Gbps per port.
As you can see on the following top output, there are some threads
significantly more loaded than others (AFPacketeth54 for example): these
threads are continuously dropping kernel packets. We raised kernel
parameters (buffers and rmem, etc) and lowered suricata timeouts flows to
just a few seconds, but we can't keep drops counter static when CPU goes to
99.9% for a specific thread.
How can we do to balance the load better on all threads to prevent this
issue?

The server is a Dell R715 2x16 core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6284, 192Gb
RAM.

idsuser at suricata:~$ top -d2

top - 10:24:05 up 1 min,  2 users,  load average: 4.49, 1.14, 0.38
Tasks: 287 total,  15 running, 272 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 30.3%us,  1.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 65.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  3.1%si,
0.0%st
Mem:  198002932k total, 59619020k used, 138383912k free,    25644k buffers
Swap: 15624188k total,        0k used, 15624188k free,   161068k cached

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

 2309 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 99.9 28.6   0:20.96
AFPacketeth54

 2314 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 99.9 28.6   0:18.29
AFPacketeth59

 2318 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 99.9 28.6   0:12.90
AFPacketeth513

 2319 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 77.6 28.6   0:12.78
AFPacketeth514

 2307 root      20   0 55.8g  54g  51g S 66.6 28.6   0:21.25
AFPacketeth52

 2338 root      20   0 55.8g  54g  51g R 58.2 28.6   0:09.94
FlowManagerThre

 2310 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 51.2 28.6   0:15.35
AFPacketeth55

 2320 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 50.2 28.6   0:07.83
AFPacketeth515

 2313 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 48.7 28.6   0:11.66
AFPacketeth58

 2321 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 47.7 28.6   0:07.75
AFPacketeth516

 2315 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 45.2 28.6   0:12.18
AFPacketeth510

 2306 root      22   2 55.8g  54g  51g R 37.3 28.6   0:12.32
AFPacketeth51

 2312 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 35.8 28.6   0:11.90
AFPacketeth57

 2308 root      20   0 55.8g  54g  51g R 34.8 28.6   0:16.69
AFPacketeth53

 2317 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 33.3 28.6   0:07.93
AFPacketeth512

 2316 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 28.8 28.6   0:08.03
AFPacketeth511

 2311 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 24.9 28.6   0:10.51
AFPacketeth56

 2331 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 19.9 28.6   0:02.41
AFPacketeth710

 2323 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 17.9 28.6   0:03.60
AFPacketeth72

 2336 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 16.9 28.6   0:01.50
AFPacketeth715

 2333 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 14.9 28.6   0:02.14
AFPacketeth712

 2330 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 13.9 28.6   0:02.12
AFPacketeth79

 2324 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 11.9 28.6   0:02.96
AFPacketeth73

 2329 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 11.9 28.6   0:01.90
AFPacketeth78

 2335 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S 11.9 28.6   0:01.44
AFPacketeth714

 2334 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R 10.9 28.6   0:01.68
AFPacketeth713

 2325 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  9.4 28.6   0:02.38
AFPacketeth74

 2326 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  8.9 28.6   0:02.71
AFPacketeth75

 2327 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  7.5 28.6   0:01.98
AFPacketeth76

 2332 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  7.5 28.6   0:01.53
AFPacketeth711

 2337 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  7.0 28.6   0:01.09
AFPacketeth716

 2328 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g S  6.0 28.6   0:02.11
AFPacketeth77

 2322 root      18  -2 55.8g  54g  51g R  5.5 28.6   0:03.78
AFPacketeth71

    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  4.5  0.0   0:01.25
ksoftirqd/0

   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.5  0.0   0:00.14
kworker/0:1


Regards
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