[OpenSIPS-Devel] Hang due to "no more nonces can be generated"

[Dan Pascu]

On Tuesday 02 December 2008, Alistair Cunningham wrote:
> We've just had OpenSIPS 1.4.2 stop processing SIP packets and
> effectively hang. During this time, it logged the following many times
> to /var/log/daemon.log:
>
> ERROR:auth:build_auth_hf: no more nonces can be generated
> ERROR:auth:challenge: failed to generate nonce
>
> Restarting OpenSIPS has temporarily cured it, but I expect the problem
> will come back.
>
> Another problem (probably unrelated) on the same machine was that when
> running "opensipsctl online", no output was produced and the following
> was logged to daemon.log:
>
> ERROR:core:create_mi_node: no more pkg mem
> ERROR:mi_fifo:mi_fifo_server: command (ul_dump) processing failed
>
> I've since set the following in config.h:
>
> #define PKG_MEM_POOL_SIZE 10*1024*1024
>
> and this problem has gone away (opensipsctl online produces 1793 lines
> of output), but it's unclear whether this will help with the nonce
> problem (I'm thinking probably not). In any case, may we please have
> either a config file option or a command line option to set
> PKG_MEM_POOL_SIZE without needing to patch the source code?

This will not fix your problem (though it may be useful to be able to set 
it at run time). The issue is not that there is not enough memory, the 
issue is fragmentation. If you use a command as ul_dump which allocates a 
huge amount of small chunks, after they are released the memory is so 
fragmented, that it's not able to allocate even 2kb, even though the pool 
it's almost completely available.

-- 
Dan