rule limitations?

[Patrick McHardy]

Nesser, Phil wrote:
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> For relatively obscure reasons, I am trying to build a set of rules that run into the hundreds of thousands.  I was experimenting on a Redhat Release 5 machine with 2.6.18 kernel and 1.3.5  iptables.  I was able to load around 340k rules before getting an error of iptables-restore: line XXXXXX failed.
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> So I try it out on a server (much beefier, 8G ram, dual quad core 2GHz proc) running the same kernel/iptables versions.  This time it died in the same way at about 40k rules.  After some research I found a log message on Vmalloc failures, so I figured what the hell and rebuilt the server using the 64 bit version of RH 5.  Now no more vmalloc failures, but still dies at around 40k entries.
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> I am more than happy to build a custom kernel if that what I need to do.  I have poked around the sources and it is not obvious what needs to change.
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> Any help would be appreciated.


What error message do you get (or if its too unspecific, what does
strace show)?