Bug ID 552151: Continuous error report in /dev/log/ltm: Device error: n3-compress0 Nitrox 3, Hang Detected

Last Modified: Sep 13, 2023

Affected Product(s):
BIG-IP LTM(all modules)

Known Affected Versions:
11.2.1, 11.3.0, 11.4.0, 11.4.1, 11.6.0, 12.0.0, 12.0.0 HF1, 12.1.0 HF1, 12.0.0 HF2, 12.1.0 HF2, 12.0.0 HF3, 12.0.0 HF4, 12.1.1 HF1, 12.1.1 HF2, 12.1.2 HF1, 12.1.2 HF2

Fixed In:
12.1.0, 11.6.1, 11.5.4 HF2

Opened: Oct 13, 2015

Severity: 2-Critical

Related Article: K41902701

Symptoms

Hardware compression slowly and progressively fails to handle compression operations. The system posts the following errors in ltm.log: crit tmm3[14130]: 01010025:2: Device error: n3-compress0 Nitrox 3.

Impact

Compression is (eventually) performed by software. This can result in high CPU utilization.

Conditions

This occurs when the system encounters errors during hardware compression handling. This occurs on the BIG-IP 5000-, 7000-, 10000-, and 12000-series platforms, and on VIPRION B22xx blades.

Workaround

Disable compression if CPU usage is too high.

Fix Information

Improved the device exception handling so that errors are correctly propagated to compression clients, thus preventing the progressive failure of the compression engine, and stopping the offload to software compression (which was driving up the CPU).

Behavior Change

Guides & references

K10134038: F5 Bug Tracker Filter Names and Tips