[dpdk-dev] RTE mempool "used count" steadily goes down to zero despite steady packet throughput

[Kamraan Nasim <knasim@sidebandnetworks.com>]

Hello,

I have ~15Gbps of traffic flowing through two 10GE ports and been profiling
the rte mempool(or rather the pktmbuf mempool) memory consumption:

I have per lcore caching disabled(cache_size is 0)

I have noticed that:
- Mempool FREE cnt(as given byt rte_mempool_free_count()) increases
- Mempool USED cnt(as given by rte_mempool_used_count() decreases and
eventually drops to 0. When this happens, mempool reports itself as EMPTY
- rx_nombuf stats for the eth ports start climbing
- Valgrind Memcheck does not indicate any obvious leaks in RTE mempool or
my application.


I was wondering if others have come across this issue?  Or if people here
have used ways, besides Valgrind to profile the mempool or the pkt mbuf
pool?

Thanks,
Kam