Solutions Log by Dan Reiland

13Jan/110

rsyslog consumes excessive memory when forwarding logs with compression

Issue:
rsyslog consumed growing amounts of memory when forwarding over TCP with compression enabled.

*.* @@(z1)hostname.domain.tld

Cause:
The compression flag causes the rsyslog process to allocate, and never release, memory. I have not determined root cause but the likely culprits are zlib or TLS (both involved when compression is enabled in this situation).

Resolution:
Do not use compression when forwarding with rsyslog. With the compression flag dropped, I was unable to reproduce the errant behavior.

*.* @@hostname.domain.tld

References:
http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_conf_actions.html