My NethServer box serves as the gateway for my office network. It does DHCP, firewall, VPN, and content filtering. I have two internal lans (green and blue) and one external. The box serves an average of about 120 users a day, and it does so very well.
This machine runs 24/7 and handles network traffic 24/7, and as it runs, it gradually runs out of free memory. After about 3 weeks it’s at 98% and if I forget to reboot, it will crash. (I have 16Gb ram on this box and lots of empty hard drive space.)
This raises a basic question about best practices: how often should one reboot? I tend towards rarely or never, because it means briefly taking down Internet access.
I’m also interested to know what constitutes normal performance for such a gateway, and whether periodic reboots are typical. If not, I’m wondering how to track down what’s using up the memory. I’ve been reading the forum and see a number of things I might try, but wondered what someone dealing with a similar issue might recommend. Thanks in advance for thinking about this.
Something is definitely not right if it runs out of memory and swap like that.
I agree that you should only need to reboot in the event of some form of update or change (like a kernel update for example) which requires a reboot which would essentially would only then need to be done on the rare occasion.
My Nethserver box can quite happily stay up for 6-9 months with no issue without a reboot.
Not sure with regards to the best way to troubleshoot exactly what is eating up the memory like that
Thanks. I’ll try some of these things and get back with my findings. I believe this is a somewhat new behavior for the box, new in the past several months, so it did seem to me likely that it’s a bug not a feature.