[Oisf-users] Suricata Startup Takes 8 to 10 Minutes with Hyperscan, High detect.profile, and Full detect.sgh-mpm-context

[Eric Urban]

I am noticing that Suricata is taking about 8-10 minutes to fully start up
under certain conditions and am wondering if anyone can say whether or not
they feel this is expected?

This happens on versions 4.0.3-4 and also a few different versions of 3.x
that I have tested.  Suricata is being compiled with Hyperscan support (and
is using for mpm- and spm-algo since set to auto) and the config is close
to vanilla with only the HOME_NET value changed, detect.profile set to
high, and sgh-mpm-context set to full.  If Hyperscan is not used or not
setting sgh-mpm-context to full, the start up time is greatly reduced so
that it is a minute or less.  Setting the detect.profile option lower does
affect the startup time but not as much as changing the previously
mentioned settings.  No alerts are generated until Suricata is fully
started.

In this case there are 27,000 rules being loaded and Suricata is running on
CentOS 7.  Loading fewer rules also does lower the start up time.

I have looked at top for high CPU/load, free for excessive memory usage,
and vmstat for any significant disc activity and none of these show
indications of high system utilization.  These 8 to 10 minute start up
times occur on both a VM (1 core, 2GB memory) and on physical hardware (40
cores, 128 GB memory).


Here is an example from the suricata.log where there was a 10 minute start
up time:
8/3/2018 -- 08:37:46 - <Notice> - This is Suricata version 4.0.3 RELEASE
8/3/2018 -- 08:37:46 - <Info> - CPUs/cores online: 40
...
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Info> - 27542 signatures processed. 250 are IP-only
rules, 12336 are inspecting packet payload, 18268 inspect application
layer, 0 are decoder event only
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - TCP toserver: 76 port groups, 71 unique
SGH's, 5 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - TCP toclient: 76 port groups, 46 unique
SGH's, 30 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - UDP toserver: 76 port groups, 43 unique
SGH's, 33 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - UDP toclient: 15 port groups, 9 unique
SGH's, 6 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - OTHER toserver: 254 proto groups, 3 unique
SGH's, 251 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:38:05 - <Perf> - OTHER toclient: 254 proto groups, 0 unique
SGH's, 254 copies
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:35 - <Perf> - Unique rule groups: 172
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:35 - <Perf> - Builtin MPM "toserver TCP packet": 57
...
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:46 - <Info> - RunModeIdsPcapWorkers initialised
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:46 - <Perf> - Setting prio 0 for thread "FM#01", thread
id 8371
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:47 - <Perf> - Setting prio 0 for thread "FR#01", thread
id 8372
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:47 - <Perf> - Setting prio 0 for thread "CW", thread id
8373
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:47 - <Perf> - Setting prio 0 for thread "CS", thread id
8374
8/3/2018 -- 08:47:47 - <Notice> - all 9 packet processing threads, 4
management threads initialized, engine started.

-- 
Eric Urban
University Information Security | Office of Information Technology |
it.umn.edu
University of Minnesota | umn.edu
eurban at umn.edu
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