topic High memory usage on Palo Alto in General Topics

High memory usage on Palo Alto

Jatin.Singh — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 05:34:20 GMT

I have an issue with a Panorama VM indicating high memory usage.

Using the following resources:

top - 10:59:58 up 82 days, 1:07, 1 user, load average: 4.22, 3.89, 3.87
Tasks: 156 total, 1 running, 152 sleeping, 0 stopped, 3 zombie
Cpu(s): 39.2%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 58.0%id, 0.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 16447708k total, 16354760k used, 92948k free, 13208k buffers
Swap: 2097084k total, 2091588k used, 5496k free, 8151152k cached

This has only recently occurred, hasn't always been the case in terms of memory usage.

What info shall we pass on to Palo TAC team or what can be cause of this?

Re: High memory usage on Palo Alto

BatD — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 08:10:27 GMT

@Jatin.Singh If you need to open a case you need to pass the tech-support file, device details and description of the issue.

I personally think that this can be ignored, unless you experience some particular issues. Palo Alto is running on top of a Linux distribution and linux utilises memory when not required, so it appears as not free, but can be released for processes when needed. This is probably not the best explanation, but there are a lot of articles on the topic, for example:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2722141/making-sense-of-memory-usage-on-linux.html

Re: High memory usage on Palo Alto

Venkatesan_radhakrishnan — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 11:53:01 GMT

Check this article for kswap in high peak.

https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000ClUbCAK