Memory Usage with openSSH 4.0

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 4/25/06, J D <parkingtree at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have friends running sshd on their emebedded ppc
> linux systems at two universities. Normally sshd takes
> about 3M of memory and they have about 16M freemem
> showed in /proc/meminfo. But occationally (every 1 or
> 2 weeks) they see free memory goes down really fast
> and they lose 10M in 1 minute. If they disable sshd by
> blocking the port access, this does not happen any
> more.
>
> The device is not behind any firewall and sshd version
> is 4.0.
>
> I've done a lot search on the web and have not found
> any report of similar issues. I was hoping experts on
> this mailing list can help shed some light on this
> problem. Thanks.
>
>

That is an old version.. so I am not sure much help here.. but there
needs to be some info on the type of configuration, also what is the
OS, etc. My off-the-wall guess is that the box gets one of the weekly
very large dictionary attack during those times and may not be able to
log as quickly as it wants to (depending on how the embedded libc is
dealing with logging).


--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator