Mailing List Archive

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 05:16:36PM -0600, Erik Anderson wrote:
> In the release notes for Nessus 1.2.7 there was a:
>
> > + Fixed memory leaks in NASL
>
> Was that a server nessusd leak or nessus client? Was that in the
> parent process or a child/fork?

in nessusd, mostly in ephemerous processes.

> Does that force us up upgrade from 1.2.6 to 1.2.7?

If you have one nessusd that is re-loaded every night by
nessus-update-users, then yes (full explanation below). If you shut down
nessusd every once in a while (eg: every week), then no.


Full explanation :

A customer of mine had a nessusd running forever and had a cronjob
reload it every night at midnight. After one month, nessusd took up
to 25Megs of RAM due to the memory leak. The problem is that before
executing a nasl plugin, Nessus does a setrlimit(RLIMIT_SIZE,
20*1024*1024), therefore asking the underlying operating system to kill
the plugin if it takes more than 20megs of ram - which it does, before
it even started to run. So all the .nasl plugins would be disabled this
way.


-- Renaud