Varnish 2.0.3 consuming excessive memory

[Darryl Dixon - Winterhouse Consulting]

Hi All,

I have an odd problem that I have only noticed happening since moving from
1.1.2 to 2.0.3 - excessive memory consumption of the varnish child
process. For example, I have a varnish instance with a 256MB cache
allocated, that is currently consuming 4.9GB of resident memory (6.5GB
virtual). The instance has only been running for 4 days and has only got
25MB of objects in the cache.

This is clearly excessive and is causing us some serious problems in terms
of memory pressure on the machine. Our VCL is largely unchanged from our
1.1.2 setup to the 2.0.3 except for the obvious vcl.syntax changes, and
the introduction of request restarts under certain limited scenarios. Can
anyone shed some light?

regards,
Darryl Dixon
Winterhouse Consulting Ltd
http://www.winterhouseconsulting.com