pf – cannot define table: Cannot allocate memory

I use pf on FreeBSD 8.1-stable as my firewall of choice. Recently I’ve started using the University of Alberta list of trapped addresses. As of the time of writing this, the list contains about 56,000 IP addresses. When combined with my own list of 27,000 SPAMTRAP addresses, I quick ran into a problem when reload my rule set:

$ sudo pfctl -f /etc/pf.rules
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
/etc/pf.rules:69: cannot define table spamd-ualberta: Cannot allocate memory
pfctl: Syntax error in config file: pf rules not loaded

Searching for this message provided the following suggestion:

set limit table-entries 200000

Looking at the existing limits, I saw:

$ sudo do pfctl -s memory
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
states        hard limit    10000
src-nodes     hard limit    10000
frags         hard limit     5000
tables        hard limit     1000
table-entries hard limit   100000

However, that didn’t solve the issue. I encountered the same error again. So I killed the table and tried again:

$ sudo pfctl -T kill -t spamd-ualberta
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
1 table deleted.

$ sudo pfctl -f /etc/pf.rules
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled

Success!