ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet

Using Linux kernel 3.12 or later? See this updated post instead.

Last week, I found myself with a server under low load, but it couldn’t make or receive network connections. When I ran dmesg, I found the following line repeating over and over:

ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet

I’d seen this message before, but I headed over to Red Hat’s site for more details. It turns out that the server was running iptables, but it was under a very heavy load and also handling a high volume of network connections. Generally, the ip_conntrack_max is set to the total MB of RAM installed multiplied by 16. However, this server had 4GB of RAM, but ip_conntrack_max was set to 65536:

# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max
65536

I logged into another server with 1GB of RAM (RHES 5, 32-bit) and another with 2GB of RAM (RHES 4, 64-bit), and both had ip_conntrack_max set to 65536. I’m not sure if this is a known Red Hat issue, or if it’s just set to a standard value out of the box.

If you want to check your server’s current tracked connections, just run the following:

# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_count

If you want to adjust it (as I did), just run the following as root:

# echo 131072 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max