[c-nsp] BGP memory usage: "holding"

[Chris Hunt]

Gurus,
    Y'all were so helpful earlier this week, I thought I'd toss this
nugget out.  I have an 7200VXR with NPE-400 taking a DFZ from a single
peer, doing iBGP with a few others.  It has the recommended 512KB of RAM
but it is occasionally bouncing all peers with the dreaded "Down No
memory" error.  Yeah, it's time to upgrade this kit.  But while I'm
doing that I'm curious where all this RAM is going.

!!  12MB free memory = bad, mmmmmkay
ASBR01#show memory summary
                Head    Total(b)     Used(b)     Free(b)   Lowest(b) 
Largest(b)
Processor   65596368   413570224   401037896    12532328     
326528      980296
      I/O    E000000    33554432     2981280    30573152    16207760   
30090524


!!  That's odd, BGP says it's only using ~113MB ("BGP using 118439934
total bytes of memory")
ASBR01#show ip bgp summ
BGP router identifier 10.10.10252, local AS number 65000
BGP table version is 1664908, main routing table version 1664908
459110 network entries using 59225190 bytes of memory
756518 path entries using 39338936 bytes of memory
129499/80241 BGP path/bestpath attribute entries using 16057876 bytes of
memory
106021 BGP AS-PATH entries using 2841818 bytes of memory
11162 BGP community entries using 976042 bytes of memory
3 BGP extended community entries using 72 bytes of memory
0 BGP route-map cache entries using 0 bytes of memory
0 BGP filter-list cache entries using 0 bytes of memory
BGP using 118439934 total bytes of memory
Dampening enabled. 272 history paths, 115 dampened paths
BGP activity 12311725/11852503 prefixes, 87288565/86531934 paths, scan
interval 60 secs


!! But this says BGP Router process is "holding" 254MB, and IP RIB
Update is using 99MB.
ASBR01#show proc memory sorted
Processor Pool Total:  413570224 Used:  401038024 Free:   12532200
      I/O Pool Total:   33554432 Used:    2981184 Free:   30573248

 PID TTY  Allocated      Freed    Holding    Getbufs    Retbufs Process
 245   0 1164760780 2722921792  266540872      21596          0 BGP
Router      
  87   0 1836812932 3588134492  103955348          0          0 IP RIB
Update   
   0   0   43672248   14234796   26726316          0          0 *Init* 

Does anyone know where all that "Holding" memory is going?  Thanks and
happy labor day!

-chris