Shibd process consumes more memory and leads to CPU spike

[Cantor, Scott]

On 10/22/12 10:36 PM, "pradeep kumar" <gmpradeep at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>We have been running our application with Shibboleth 2.3 for last one
>year with around 4k user load. Now we have increased our user base up to
>20k and all in a sudden we have observed CPU spike due to shibd process
>consumes more memory. The interesting part
> here is, this happens every day in between 4-5PM EST. The shibd process
>alone consumes around 1GB memory when the CPU spike happens.

Probably because of a prefork Apache, and using a default thread stack
size. This is discussed a number of times in the list archives and is
discussed a bit in the documentation now (NativeSPApacheConfig).

If you're running in worker mode, then something else is going on, but I
would check that first and you can follow up if not.

>Has this been noticed already anywhere? We feel it could be due to
>Shibboleth memory leak.

There is no leak of that magnitude, and even if there were, you're running
an unsupported version and would have no recourse anyway but to upgrade.

I would also politely suggest that you need to take a look at the security
advisories.

-- Scott