Description

SRX 5K Series with SPC3 card model will have the SPU running with memory allocated over 60% without any traffic on the device. 

Symptoms

Memory utilization values can be seen running over 65% for the SPU even with no security flow sessions allocated or just a small number of sessions: 


The below command will display the number of sessions per SPU and the CPU and Memory for CP and SPUs:

> show security monitoring
                 Flow session  Flow session    CP session    CP session
FPC PIC CPU Mem       current       maximum       current       maximum
 5  0  0 40             1      13107200             1      15728640             <<< CP running with 40% allocated memory
 5  1  0 65             0      26214400             2      31457280              <<< SPU running with 65% allocated memory
Total Sessions:             1      39321600             3      47185920

 

Solution

The behaviour is by design as the board has pre-allocated memory and will reach these 60-66% memory utilization values after boot up is completed;

How to check the memory utilization:

> show security monitoring
                 Flow session  Flow session    CP session    CP session
FPC PIC CPU Mem       current       maximum       current       maximum
 5  0    0  40             1      13107200             1      15728640             <<< by default the CP will be around 40%
 5  1    0  65             0      26214400             2      31457280             <<< by default the SPU will be around 65%
Total Sessions:            1      39321600             3      47185920


Check the values from shell for the SPU:

>cli
% vty fpc5.pic1
show memory    
ID        Base      Total(b)       Free(b)       Used(b)   %   Name
--  ----------   -----------   -----------   -----------  ---   -----------
0    40000000    1073741824     780302912     293438912   27  Kernel
1   686620000   50358779904    4415876544   45942903360   91  User     <<< Pre-allocated 



The values of the SPC2 card are listed below, but it has a different design and should not be compared with SPC3 in terms of how memory is allocated

> show security monitoring 
                  Flow session   Flow session     CP session     CP session 
FPC PIC CPU Mem        current        maximum        current        maximum
  3   0   0  14              0              0              0              0
  3   1   0  10              0        6291456              0        7549747
  3   2   0  10              0        6291456              0        7549747
  3   3   0  10              0        6291456              0        7549747

Modification History

21 Aug: KCS Article created - initial version