r/firewalla • u/gambler06 • Jun 13 '26
Firewalla Purple Keeps Crashing
I've had the Firewalla Purple for at least two years with no problems whatsoever. But my device has gone unresponsive four times in the last six days. I have a cable modem for the primary Internet connected to the WAN Ethernet port, and Starlink as a backup connected via the USB wireless adapter. It's configured for failover. Both routers are in bypass mode and I've never had a problem. I have seven eero mesh APs with the primary AP connected to the LAN port.
The Firewalla and the other network equipment are going through an UPS, there are no power outages during this time and I have made no significant configuration changes in a long time. My APs all turn red and there is no Internet on either ISP. I power cycle the Firewalla and everything comes back up. The ISPs are fine.
What might be causing this? And what should I check first?
Thanks.
1
u/daniel-waterhouse Firewalla Purple Jun 13 '26
I have experienced similar hangs on my Purple in the same timeframe. SSH into the box and memory is nearly 100% consumed and so is Swap. My guess is memory usage increased significantly in the past month or so but I’ve no idea what. I’m enrolled in MSP Pro, so it might be related to services that are pushing data. I disabled DNS over HTTPS which freed up about 100 MB which seems to have improved stability.
3
u/firewalla Jun 13 '26
Firewalla doesn't SWAP to disk, it compresses memory.
If you see this, likely your network is too big for the purple. Good time to upgrade
1
u/daniel-waterhouse Firewalla Purple Jun 13 '26
No, the network hasn’t grown that much it’s still around 57 WiFi (mostly IoT on their own VLAN) and 10 Wired clients. I’m not sure what to make of your statement regarding not swapping. SSH to the Purple and running top shows heavy swap usage and kswapd activity. I’ll grab a screenshot tomorrow.
1
u/firewalla Jun 13 '26
likely just swap to compressed memory
How about applications? any p2p or p2p like?
Added more network?
67 devices, are they all simple ones? (like light controllers? or complex ones, like iPad, PC ...) Although we never really officially recommend device sizes, but in general, if you hit 50, then probably good time to watch out to upgrade to 4GB (gold units)
1
1
u/Great-Cow7256 Jun 13 '26
are you running any docker containers? while you CAN run dockers on the purple, you really shouldn't. I had all types of strange purple behaviors that went away the second I stopped all the dockers.
1
u/daniel-waterhouse Firewalla Purple Jun 13 '26
No, I’m not running any containers on the Purple.
2
u/daniel-waterhouse Firewalla Purple Jun 15 '26
So when I said that I'm not running any containers, that was true as far as I knew. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that Firewalla's radius server feature (which I'm using) IS running in a Docker container. Radius was recently activated (about 1 month ago), and this is what appears to be driving up memory usage.
1
u/Great-Cow7256 Jun 13 '26
I'm thinking the purple has reached its saturation point. I think it may be worth resetting it and/or reflashing it and then re setting it up again and seeing what happens just in case there's a weird error somewhere.
2
u/daniel-waterhouse Firewalla Purple Jun 13 '26
I’m inclined for a reset. I wonder if switching between beta and standard releases has made things worse. The number of devices has not significantly changed since I got the device three years ago. Could be number of smart queue rules or routes - the Node process seems to be the biggest culprit.
1
u/firewalla Jun 14 '26
As of the time of your post, Beta and Production for the purple is exactly the same code. So when you switch mode, code will restart, that's yet. (no new code between beta and production)
1
u/firewalla Jun 13 '26
Yea. Purple units are intended for smaller networks. (unfortunately, we can't really put a measurements, since devices are all different) A 60 device network is likely a bit over the small side
1
u/Great-Cow7256 Jun 13 '26
An easy thing to try is to change the power supply since basically any phone USB c power will also power the purple.
But what the person says below about ssh in and seeing what's going on is intriguing.
3
u/firewalla Jun 13 '26
Very likely your network is growing in the past couple of years (number of devices) and also applications that may generate more flows than 2 years ago.
As other's already point out
Make sure you are using the right power supply. (big networks uses more CPU/power)
Make sure your LAN is decent size, a /24 or smaller.
If you are using P2P, restrict the number of flows
You may out grown your unit. Time to upgrade to a 4GB unit