Varnish virtual memory usage

[cripy]

I experienced this same issue under x64.  Varnish seemed great but once I
put some real traffic on it under x64 the memory leaks began and it would
eventually crash/restart.

Ended up putting Varnish on the back burner and have been waiting for it to
stabilize before even trying to present it to upper management again.

Varnish has great potential but until it can run stable under x64 it's got a
long fight ahead of itself.

(I do want to note that my comments are based mainly on varnish 1 and not
varnish 2.0)

--cripy

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Henry Paulissen <h.paulissen at qbell.nl>wrote:

> We encounter the same problem.
>
> Its seems to occur only on x64 platforms.
> We decided to take a different approach and installed vmware to the
> machine.
> Next we did a setup of 6 guests with x32 PAE software.
>
> No strange memory leaks occurred since then at the price of small storage
> (3.5G max) and limited worker threads (256 max).
>
> Opened a ticket for the problem, but the wont listen until I buy a support
> contract (á €8K).
> Seems they don’t want to know there is some kind of memory issue in their
> software.
>
> Anyway...
> Varnish is running stable now with some few tricks.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: varnish-misc-bounces at projects.linpro.no [mailto:
> varnish-misc-bounces at projects.linpro.no] On Behalf Of Kristian Lyngstol
> Sent: woensdag 21 oktober 2009 13:34
> To: Roi Avinoam
> Cc: varnish-misc at projects.linpro.no
> Subject: Re: Varnish virtual memory usage
>
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 02:55:07PM +0300, Roi Avinoam wrote:
> > At Metacafe we're testing the integration with Varnish, and I was
> > tasked with benchmarking our Varnish setup. I intentionally
> > over-flooded the server with requests, in an attempt to see how the
> > system will behave under extensive traffic. Surprisingly, the server
> > ran out of swap and crashed.
>
> That seems mighty strange. What sort of tests did you do?
>
> > In out configuration, "-s file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,1G".
> > Does it mean Varnish shouldn't use more than 1GB of the virtual memory?
> > Is there any other way to limit the memory/storage usage?
>
> If you are using -s file and you have 4GB of memory, you are telling
> Varnish to create a _file_ of 1GB, and it's up to the kernel what it keeps
> in memory or not. If you actually run out of memory with this setup, you've
> either hit a bug (need more details first), or you're doing something
> strange like having the mmaped file (/var/lib/varnish/) in tmpfs with a
> sizelimit less than 1GB or something along those lines. But I need more
> details to say anything for certain.
>
> --
> Kristian Lyngstøl
> Redpill Linpro AS
> Tlf: +47 21544179
> Mob: +47 99014497
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> varnish-misc at projects.linpro.no
> http://projects.linpro.no/mailman/listinfo/varnish-misc
>
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