make varnish don't start a subprocess

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Harald Friessnegger <harald at webmeisterei.com> writes:
> i'd be happy to make varnish stick to a certain memory limit.
> maybe you've got some ideas how to make that happen?
>
> is the file backend i'm using too small?

If you're using a storage file, varnishd will use a relatively small
amount of memory + address space roughly equal to the size of the file.

> whilst the file itself is exactly 500 megabyte in size, varnish
> uses 1115M memory - 44% of the total available 2,5GB RAM (1,5GB RAM, 1GB 
> disk-swap) after 5 days of uptime. see `figure 1` below.

It's not that simple.  The file is mapped into varnishd's address space,
so the VIRT number you get from top includes the size of the file (as
well as the size of the program itself and all libraries it uses).  RES
is how much of that is actually in RAM.  The OS may swap unused parts of
the cache to the storage file, but never to the swap partition.

You should probably look at /proc/$pid/map instead of using top, BTW.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no