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English Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: mokai on December 19, 2025, 10:31:39 AM

Title: CARP Firewall Outage with massive Process Pile-up of update_tables.py & pfctl
Post by: mokai on December 19, 2025, 10:31:39 AM
Hi everyone,

yesterday night we experienced a severe outage of ~ 3-4 Minutes on our OPNsense firewall where the system load spiked to over 100, rendering the web GUI unresponsive and completely blocking all network traffic.

System Environment:

OS: OPNsense (25.7.3_7)

Services: Multiple OpenVPN Servers, large number of Aliases/Tables (each with small amount of entries, <15).

Observed Symptoms:

- Load Average > 100.
- Hundreds of python3 ... update_tables.py --types authgroup processes.
- Multiple pfctl -t [ALIAS] -T replace -f /var/db/aliastables/[...].txt processes stuck in state R (running) or D (disk wait).
- Frequent ovpn_event.py triggers (add/delete/update).

The pfctl could be seen 3 or 4 times with the same table, which gives me the impression that there is a bug.

We appended a redacted logfile. This is a productive HA/CARP firewall in the datacenter so that this issue gives me quite a headache.

Is this a known issue?
Why would there be no flock or another locking mechanism on the update_tables.py?
Do we use the wrong hardware for this?

Specs : 8 x E-2234 @ 3.6GHz, 8GB RAM, 200 GB SSD, 1 x 40 GE LAGG, 1 x 10GE LAGG, 1 x 1GE CARP
Usage : 12 VLANs, 3 Wireguard Server (200 clients), 3 OpenVPN Server (200 clients little traffic), Average Traffic ~1GB/s on all interfaces

Thanks for any help