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ASA Processes

kalebkspkalebksp Member Posts: 1,033 ■■■■■□□□□□
in CCNP Security
Does anyone know where I can find a description of the various processes on an ASA? I have a 5505 in my lab that I just upgraded to 8.3 for testing. When I ran 'show cpu' I noticed that the utilization was around 10% even though the config was very simple and there was no traffic on the device. 'show processes cpu-usage' revealed that esw-stats is the culprit but I can't find any information on what it does.

Thanks in advance.
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    tierstentiersten Member Posts: 4,505
    kalebksp wrote: »
    Does anyone know where I can find a description of the various processes on an ASA?
    I don't believe they're actually documented outside of Cisco.
    kalebksp wrote: »
    I have a 5505 in my lab that I just upgraded to 8.3 for testing. When I ran 'show cpu' I noticed that the utilization was around 10% even though the config was very simple and there was no traffic on the device. 'show processes cpu-usage' revealed that esw-stats is the culprit but I can't find any information on what it does.
    I wouldn't worry about it. esw-stats is a background process and always runs. You're nowhere near 100% either. My spare ASA5505 has around 8-9% CPU usage for that particular process as well.

    As a guess from the name, I assume it is a process that is gathering stats from the built in Ethernet switch.

    You could ask TAC or maybe post on NSP to see if an engineer is feeling helpful.
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    kalebkspkalebksp Member Posts: 1,033 ■■■■■□□□□□
    Thanks tiersten. My ASA has nothing connected to it so it seems really odd that ~10% of the CPU would be taken up by a stats process. I'll have to downgrade to 8.2 and check whether it did the same thing.
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    tierstentiersten Member Posts: 4,505
    kalebksp wrote: »
    My ASA has nothing connected to it so it seems really odd that ~10% of the CPU would be taken up by a stats process. I'll have to downgrade to 8.2 and check whether it did the same thing.
    It does seem kind of high. The ASA runs Linux with some custom drivers and a massive firewall process called LINA that does everything. It is possible to extract the FS image out of an ASA firmware file and then locate the esw-stats binary. No idea if you'd find anything useful though.
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    shednikshednik Member Posts: 2,005
    kalebksp wrote: »
    Thanks tiersten. My ASA has nothing connected to it so it seems really odd that ~10% of the CPU would be taken up by a stats process. I'll have to downgrade to 8.2 and check whether it did the same thing.


    8.3 is just a resource hog all together. I was on the beta for this software and it kept telling me my 5540s didn't have the resources to run this code. There are some interesting changes to the new code but I didn't have it log enough before I had to make those devices production.
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