Varnish memory usage

[Jan-Aage Frydenbø-Bruvoll]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 16:52, Andreas Plesner Jacobsen <apj at mutt.dk> wrote:
> > SMA.Transient.g_bytes   4409627649          .   Bytes outstanding

Thanks Andreas, this is incredibly useful information. Now, since last
I posted, the process in question has grown further, to

25653 nobody    20   0 59.7g  21g  81m S   22 22.4   1092:15 varnishd

and varnishstat says

proxy03 jan # varnishstat -1 | grep -i trans
SMA.Transient.c_req     14802020        24.56 Allocator requests
SMA.Transient.c_fail           0         0.00 Allocator failures
SMA.Transient.c_bytes 963605906690   1598878.84 Bytes allocated
SMA.Transient.c_freed 951833551349   1579345.37 Bytes freed
SMA.Transient.g_alloc      1239195          .   Allocations outstanding
SMA.Transient.g_bytes  11772355341          .   Bytes outstanding
SMA.Transient.g_space            0          .   Bytes available

When would transient objects actually leave the storage again? Can I
force/trigger/monitor this at all?

The manual says "By default Varnish would use an unlimited malloc
backend for this", which in my case is rather inconvenient since this
varnish process sits in an LXC container, where it apparently sees the
host's memory allocation and not the container's - that in turn leads
to amusing situations where Varnish runs head first into the LXC
resource limitations and gets OOM-killed.

Best regards
Jan