flowd_aggregator High CPU Usage on 21.1.4

[ackatack]

Hello,

I upgraded from 21.1 to 21.1.4 last night. I have high CPU usage by the flowd_aggregator.py process since the upgrade. The process is frequently using 100% of one CPU core. I searched these forums and the web for possible solutions prior to posting.

Here is what I have tried to do to resolve this situation:

• Reboot
• Disabled IPv6 on WAN and LAN (not used on WAN so not needed on LAN)
• Cleared, applied, reconfigured, and then applied Netflow settings in the Reporting section
• Checked for additional updates

The CPU usage is under 1% with the flowd_aggregate service disabled. I am running OPNsense on a custom PC I built using an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570S CPU @ 2.90GHz (4 cores).

I appreciate your time and any assistance you can provide. Also, please let me know if I have posted this in the wrong section.

Thanks!

[gpb]

Probably normal…more here.

https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/3587

[ackatack]

If this is the issue, why would it appear after the upgrade from 21.1 to 21.1.4? The reason I noticed it is that the fans have ramped to 100% so the system is much noisier than it has been in the past.

[opnfwb]

Flowd has been a CPU hog for quite some time now. At least back to the 19.x series. It only takes one thread and it is not continuous usage, but every 2 minutes or so it runs to aggregate all the usage stats. As far as I can tell, this is normal behavior. I noticed the CPU spikes back when OPNsense had to shift away from Python 2.x to 3.x (python 2.x was being deprecated so they moved to a newer version). This was when I noticed the significant CPU usage from flowd aggregator.

I would suspect that your 21.1 install also had similar CPU usage issues but you weren't looking for them because the system fans were not increasing. Did anything else change when you upgraded to 21.1.4? Any different bios or system firmware settings changes? I suspect there's another component that is now causing your fans to increase in RPM that is not directly related to the occasional CPU spikes from flowd.

OPNsense also can log CPU temp under Reporting/Health/System/CPUtemp. If you look at your CPU temp for the last 44 days, do you see a significant spike in CPU temperature that would coincide with the 21.1.4 upgrade?