Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most common symptom of this is someone mentioning that their home 'router' regularly needs reboots to keep working well. Excluding memory leaks, it's frequently the state table running out of space and connections going sideways as a result. This is hard for individuals to see, but put a fair bit of load on a home consumer 'router' and, presuming you can get enough access to it to watch resources, you'll see it r…
Makes sense if this happens, but does this actually happen to you? I've heard vague and rather dubious third-hand stories along these lines, but I've never actually encountered a router that needs rebooting to keep working well. This actually seems bizarre to me now that I think more about it. The routers I've seen allow something like a few hundred thousand established connections over like a ~week. Say 300,000 over…
Professionally I run one (two, actually) of those annoying 'always online video games' and state drops in low quality routers is the most common cause of VOIP drop.
It seems like most router firmware has some kind of intelligent sensing software to see if there's a lot of traffic going over a state and then attempting to avoid evicting it. But for VOIP which can sometimes be silent.. or for a person not moving around in a game (and thus sending/recieving very few and very tiny updates) it can be seen.
Now; you want concrete evidence, and unfortunately the kinds of routers most people have (Say, a Virgin Hub 3.0 which is based on the Touchstone TG2492[0]) does not lend itself to being monitored well.
We're in some luck though, as I happen to run something immeasurably more powerful: a PfSense branded NetGate APU2[1]
PfSense absolutely /loves/ letting you know how it feels; and if we assume that I'm a "normal" user, (I have 1 laptop, 1 phone and an apple watch as the only devices on my network right now and I'm just browsing like normal) then we have some measure of how much memory a state table really consumes.
My state table currently contains a mere 170 states (according to iftop), but it's not really hurting my memory:
> 6% of 4030 MiB
Yet, I can see that some states have been forcefully closed, despite having lots of ram available to store too (these statistics were reset yesterday):
state-mismatch 748 0.0/s
In general the state table is very busy: State Table Total Rate
current entries 152
searches 90040931 338.1/s
inserts 437333 1.6/s
removals 437181 1.6/s
it's worth noting that this device is forcefully configuring itself to hit a max of 403000 states total: states hard limit 403000
So it's not "memory" like you suggest, but since doing nat translation on every single packet is CPU intensive, states can be dropped if the table can't keep up.[0]: 256MB of ram reserved for the state table it seems: https://deviwiki.com/wiki/Virgin_Media_Super_Hub_3
[1]: 4G of general purpose ram: https://www.firewallhardware.it/en/apu2-3nic/