Freeradius consuming a lot of memory > 1.6G

[Pshem Kowalczyk]

Hi,

We've built a radius-proxy using freeradius and rlm_perl (with
ithreads). Currently we have the following settings:

thread pool {
        start_servers = 20
        max_servers = 100
        min_spare_servers = 20
        max_spare_servers = 50
        max_requests_per_server = 500
}

        perl {
                module = /usr/lib/perl5/rlmPerl.pm

                func_authenticate = authenticate
                func_authorize = authorize
                func_preacct = preacct
                func_accounting = accounting
                func_checksimul = checksimul
                func_pre_proxy = pre_proxy
                func_post_proxy = post_proxy
                func_post_auth = post_auth
                func_xlat = xlat
                func_detach = detach

                max_clones = 100
                start_clones = 20
                min_spare_clones = 20
                max_spare_clones = 100
                cleanup_delay = 5
                max_request_per_clone = 100

        }


The whole setup works fine (there are two machines, load-balanced).
Every single request is piped to the rlm_perl. The number of threads
(ps -eLf) oscillates around 45-50 on both machines. There are no
dealys, or any problems, except for the huge memory consumption.
Authentication request are simply proxied (with minimal changes to the
packets - filtering out some attributes and setting the others, no db
access), accounting is send to a session database (postgresql) on a
separate machine (no load problems there).
Should freeradius use that amount of memory?
The amount of memory is directly linked to the number of threads -
with 25 threads (in the middle of the night) the memory consumption
drops to about 900M.

perl useses the following modules:
use DBI;
use Digest::JHash qw(jhash);
use IPC::Shareable (':lock');
use Storable;

(all variables shared between perl threads are stored in shared memory
using perl IPC).

So the question is should freeradius use that amount of memory and how
can I decrease that?

regards
pshemko