varnishd restarting randomly

[Andreas Plesner Jacobsen]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 05:04:52PM +0100, Jonathan Matthews wrote:
> >
> >> > 2) Are you using "grace"? It has some undocumented (except on the
> >> > list) flaw where it gobbles more and more and more RAM, eventually
> >> > leading to something going wrong somewhere.
> >
> > I'd like to hear more about this, since I can't recognize what you're
> > describing, and if there's a bug, it should be in the tracker.
> 
> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/2012-March/021886.html
> was the thread I was thinking of.

It's not a flaw as such. It's working as designed: The object is kept in memory
for the duration of grace. Rogier's patch is an optimization where graced
objects can be discarded sooner, if there are alternatives that can cover
delivery of all variants.

I'm not even sure that Per has analyzed the situation correctly. I'm much more
inclined to believe that the reason for the unbounded memory growth is that the
TTL of the objects is less than the shortlived parameter, thus they end up in
the Transient store, which has no limit by default.

So I really believe that mixing grace into this is a wild goose chase.

-- 
Andreas