Address Performance Issues Caused by Low Entropy on Virtual Appliance

Products

• CA Identity Manager
• CA Identity Governance
• CA Identity Portal

Issue/Introduction

Low system entropy on a virtual appliance can cause significant performance degradation, as cryptographic processes and other system functions cannot proceed normally. This article provides steps to resolve performance issues by ensuring the rngd service is enabled and running.

Environment

• Product: CA Identity Suite
• Component: Virtual Appliance
• Version: 14.x

Cause

Performance issues occur when the Linux kernel lacks sufficient entropy (randomness), often because the rngd (Random Number Generator Daemon) service is disabled or not running on the virtual appliance.

Resolution

1. Check the current status of the rngd service by running the following command: chkconfig --list | grep "rngd"
2. If the output contains 3:off, the service is disabled. Run the following command to enable it: chkconfig rngd on 3
3. Start the service: sudo service rngd start
4. Verify the current entropy level available to the kernel: cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail (Note: An increase in this value indicates the service is correctly providing entropy to the system.)