[Oisf-users] Suricata causes massive packet loss

[peter.mueller at ipfire.org]

Hello Nelson, hello Peter, hello *,

thank you for your replies.

Upgrading to Suricata 5.0-beta is a difficult task, as we cannot
simply ship beta releases in our firewall distribution. Personally,
I rather doubt this is an issue due to a kernel/library/... combination,
as we use Suricata for quite a while now and are upgrading IPFire's
distribution kernel on a regular basis.

Anyway, Stefan (see CC) is currently working on Rust for the distribution,
so we hope to take advantage of some more features soon. But since
our issue is regarding packet loss for at least DNS and TLS traffic,
I rather doubt Rust will make a big difference here.

Changing from "workers" to "autofp" mode unfortunately did not solve
the problem. It is good to know the latter is recommended for inline
deployments, "workers" was about 0.5 % faster in our benchmarks.

In IPFire, Suricata is started by a custom init script (please refer
to https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob;f=src/initscripts/system/suricata;h=5a567f2d7f4bfef90fabb11438bc5065e731f21c;hb=HEAD
for its content) and appears like this in the process list:
> [root at maverick ~]# ps aux | grep suricata
> suricata  4882 10.9  7.3 1419868 289192 ?      Ssl  20:38   1:37 /usr/bin/suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -D -q 0 -q 1 -q 2 -q 3

I am not sure what the number behind "tcp.pkt_on_wrong_thread" should
read like normally. @Peter: Is it too low or too high?

We will ship an update for libhtp as soon as possible, thank you
for catching this.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller