Bug ID 1759757: UDP traffic may cause the F5OS dma-agent process to report artificially high CPU utilization.

Last Modified: Oct 19, 2025

Affected Product(s):
F5OS F5OS-A, F5OS-C(all modules)

Known Affected Versions:
F5OS-A 1.5.1, F5OS-A 1.5.2, F5OS-A 1.5.3, F5OS-A 1.5.4, F5OS-A 1.8.0, F5OS-A 1.8.3

Opened: Dec 09, 2024

Severity: 5-Cosmetic

Symptoms

UDP based workloads on F5OS platforms may cause the dma-agent process to report higher CPU utilization than other traffic workloads. The reported high CPU utilization is not a reflection of actual F5OS data plane capacity. It is an artifact of dma-agent busy polling and Linux CPU utilization accounting. The dma-agent busy polling behavior is intentional and reduces traffic latency through the F5OS platform.

Impact

CPU utilization reported by SNMP and Linux process monitoring tools (such as ps and top) should not be used to measure F5OS platform dataplane capacity. Note this does not apply to the CPU utilization of TMM processes in tenants.

Conditions

F5OS platform handling UDP traffic. Even a relatively low rate of UDP traffic may elicit high CPU utilization in the dma-agent process.

Workaround

None

Fix Information

None

Behavior Change

Guides & references

K10134038: F5 Bug Tracker Filter Names and Tips