What’s the purpose of JUNOS’ sfid process

juniperjuniper-exjuniper-junos

In the last few days, one Juniper EX-2200-48P has started complaining via syslog:

Jun 21 12:50:03 ex2200-b sfid[717]:
TASK_OS_MEMHIGH: Using 52118 KB of memory, 103 percent of available

After a visit on Juniper's website and search engine kung-fu, it appears I cannot find anything that states clearly what sfid takes care of.

Thus, I have two questions:

  1. What is the purpose of that sfid process?
  2. Is the above memory situation problematic and if so, can I safely restart it without impact?

Best Answer

The sfid process is the software forwarding infrastructure daemon. This process handles all traffic that the switch cannot handle in hardware alone. Common examples of such traffic are:

  • GRE encapsulation
  • ARP resolution
  • management traffic

High CPU usage for the sfid process might indicate a problem, and certainly could impact performance when you have legitimate traffic that ought to be software switched. I would suggest checking what traffic causes this problem in the first place.

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