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2020.5 update acting weird (CPU or RAM usage, depending on the project)

Luc | Last updated: Jun 08, 2020 09:14AM UTC

After updating, I opened my 250MiB project file (last used with 2020.4.1) and Burp started using 100% CPU on both of the cores that I assigned to the project VM. The whole system was a bit slow but both it and Burp were otherwise responsive. Re-opening the .burp file it happened again. Then I checked if it happens with a clean project as well: it doesn't. Since I planned to nuke the .burp file soon anyway, I wrote it off as not an issue for me. Now that I ran into another issue and figured I'd make a bug report, opening this old file doesn't cause the CPU issue anymore, so I can't reproduce it. The second issue I ran into after updating is with a new project file that had accumulated 45 HTTP requests; the .burp file is about 16MiB. Upon opening, memory usage of Burp jumps from about 700MB (for a clean file, already more than my entire operating system with a graphical and not-light Cinnamon desktop environment...) to nearly two gigabytes. I don't know how much it used in past versions since I never looked at it: the 3500M that I assign to project VMs has always been plenty for web pentesting, now with version 2020.5 I ran out of RAM for the first time. Trying to reproduce this issue again with a clean file, it again isn't reproducible. Memory usage remains between 700 and 750MiB. Note that these issues happened right after each other, it's not as if I've been using the updated version for days or even hours. I'm not sure if the issues are related and I can't provide steps to reproduce either. I'm mainly opening this in case others run into the same issues and can chime in, perhaps we can find steps to reproduce. (I also don't have hours available to test various things, I'm already spending too much time testing and writing this up.)

Uthman, PortSwigger Agent | Last updated: Jun 08, 2020 12:33PM UTC

Thanks for reporting this. If this issue occurs again, can you please email us with your diagnostics, screenshots, and further information? How many CPU cores do you have in total? Is there any other CPU-intensive task running on your machine/VM when you launch the scans? How many tasks/scans are running in your projects?

Luc | Last updated: Jun 08, 2020 02:11PM UTC

I have 2 cores with 2 threads each on the host and 2 cores (1 thread each) assigned to the VM. It was definitely Burp that was using the CPU: that process showed up as using 200% CPU. The only tasks/scans running are the default ones, "live passive crawl from proxy" and "live audit from proxy". For diagnostics to include if this happens again, I assume you mean the info in Help -> Diagnostics? So far it seems to work fine now, not sure what the difference is between a clean project file I created this morning (that had the RAM issue) and a clean project file that I started after writing this post (which now has >1000 requests in the history but it's still using <1GiB RAM)...

Uthman, PortSwigger Agent | Last updated: Jun 08, 2020 02:29PM UTC

Thanks for sharing your findings. Help > Diagnostics would be the information we need!

Grant | Last updated: Jun 10, 2020 03:37AM UTC

I would like to second this issue. I have a work laptop running two CPU cores and 16 Gigs of RAM. I started a clean temporary project to work on PortSwigger labs. I had no active scans running and I was using the same extensions that I always use. At one point, Burp managed to eat up 7-8 Gigs of RAM and consume like 60-70% of my CPU for no apparent reason. I couldn't grab a screenshot because my RAM was about to cap out and my computer was running too slowly to do much except close Burp. I have since rolled back to 2020.2. Now that I am back on this version, I am experiencing no such issue. I'll try to get some diagnostics to you if I can; I think I'll try updating my version of Burp running on my personal machine instead and seeing if I can replicate the issue from there. However, I really need the pro edition to work properly for my job and I can't afford to be debugging that kind of issue right now. Thank you for being considerate and looking into this issue!

Uthman, PortSwigger Agent | Last updated: Jun 10, 2020 08:39AM UTC