Memory Leak in PAN 3.1?

[kevin.shain]

We are evaluating a PA-500 unit that has 3.1 installed on it.  It seems to have a memory leak.  I just rebooted the unit because it was low on memory (30mb), when it first came up it had 288mb free memory, however after being up for a few minutes it is down to 5mb.  There are only 60 active sessions at the moment since nobody is on campus.  What could be the problem?

[mharding]

I have a PA-500 still on 3.0.4, and it has 57mb free with 10 sessions. Our PA-2050 is on 3.0.9, and it has 5.9mb free with around 3k sessions. From the year that we've had the PA-2050 and PA-500, it tends to use the memory if it's there.

Your best bet to tell if it's a memory leak in say the mgmtsrv process, it to SSH into the box and run the command "show system resources". Keep an eye on the virt column and see if the numbers climb as you move around the GUI.

[kbrazil · Accepted solution]

I believe you are seeing the memory utilization for the Control Plane and not the Data Plane.  They are completely separate and the Control Plane CPU and Memory has nothing to do with sessions or traffic through the box. It is only concerned with the Web GUI, CLI, routing protocol daemons, logging, reporting, and other administrative tasks.

To see the resource utilization for the Data Plane use the following commands:

PANOS 3.1: show running resource-monitor

PANOS 3.0 and below: debug dataplane show resource-monitor

The show system resources command will show you the memory and CPU utilization of the Control Plane, as does the GUI widget on the dashboard.

Cheers,

Kelly