Memory is 70/80% all the time

[oron]

Hi My fortigate 80c memory is 70/80% all the time 1. Can I clear it without restarting the device? 2. Can it cause a slowdown of the device? 3. Can I see through SSH is there a load on the device and where they come from? Thanks in advance

[ede_pfau]

hi, in short: 1. No 2. Yes, def! 3. yes a bit more informative: 1. you could kill single processes but I would fear that the overall stability is compromised by this. A reboot is quick and thorough. 2. Starting at a memory consumption of 80% some processes will be stopped/killed in order to keep the appliance alive. The last process to be killed is firewalling. Your FGT should not reach 75-80% mem over an extended period of time. 3. the command to see running processes and their CPU and memory load is

 diag sys top

. Output is sorted alphabetically. Sort by memory usage by pressing " M" , by CPU load pressing " P" . Quit with " Q" . Most often a " do it all" IPS policy is causing excessive memory consumption. One should select carefully which IPS patterns to scan for, and differentiate e.g. clients and servers in different policies with different IPS profiles.

[Dave_Hall]

The Fortinet KB has several articles on troubleshooting/handling/reducing memory usage on fortigates. Just key-in " conserve mode" as an example. Once the fgt reaches 80% memory usage or over, it starts to shut down certain processes -- it' s better to reboot the unit then assess/diagnose what the problem is. Follow the various steps outlined in the various kb articles about reducing memory usage. If this is not enough, either consider downgrading the firmware to one with less features and memory footprint or upgrade the fgt to a higher model or one with more memory.

[mhe]

Check if you can upgrade to the latest 4.3 release.

[Rick_H]

I' m not sure which version of FortiOS you' re running, but we were having similar problems with both 4.3.8 and 4.3.10. Upgrading to 4.3.12 (the most recent) took us from an average of 70% memory usage to well under 50% on average.

[Robert_Cerny]

Hi, enclosed please find an image displaying CPU&Memory just after upgrade from FortiOS 4.3.3 to FortiOS 4.3.11. The box suffered from frequent conserve modes before an upgrade.