Varnish 3.0.2 on FreeBSD 8-STABLE: Constant Restart

Marc Fournier lists at hub.org
Wed Jul 18 10:21:59 CEST 2012


Okay, at this point, I think I have to be missing something fairly obvious here, so maybe I'm asking the question wrong …

I'm not even to the point right now of caring about whether or not I have a good hit rate … right now, I'm wondering why it consistently crashes:

www   62495  0.0  0.0 355672036  6204  ??  IJ    6:43AM   0:01.32 varnishd: Varnish-Chld lb1.hospitalityleaders.com (varnishd)
root  74714  0.0  0.0 98032  2364  ??  SsJ  Fri04PM   0:08.97 varnishd: Varnish-Mgr lb1.hospitalityleaders.com (varnishd)

If I hit the site with varnishlog running, I see:

    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598723 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598726 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598729 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598732 1.0
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7fffff5fbbb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7fffff3fabb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7fffff1f9bb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffedf7bb0 start
    0 CLI          - Rd vcl.load "boot" ./vcl.M1UEoiQY.so
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffebf6bb0 start
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 36 Loaded "./vcl.M1UEoiQY.so" as "boot"
    0 CLI          - Rd vcl.use "boot"
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 0 
    0 CLI          - Rd start
    0 Debug        - "Acceptor is kqueue"
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 0 
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffe5f3bb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffe3f2bb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffe1f1bb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffdff0bb0 start
    0 WorkThread   - 0x7ffffddefbb0 start
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598737 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1342598740 1.0

And /var/log/debug.log on the machine shows:

Jul 18 06:43:11 lb1 varnishd[74714]: Child cleanup complete
Jul 18 08:04:23 lb1 varnishd[74714]: Child cleanup complete

Now, I just modified my vcl_recv function so that all it does is 'return (pass);', and it seems to work, so I'm going to step through the code I had, to see at what point it does break …

The code I'm using as my starting point is what is available on github:

	https://github.com/mattiasgeniar/varnish-3.0-configuration-templates

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but figured like most code, there was some sort of syntactically checker, or log error message, that would indicate what/where in the config a bug was, not it just crashing :(

As I said, I will go through and see if I can't narrow down where the crash itself is occurring by slowly enabling small chunks of the config …

Thanks ...




On 2012-07-18, at 3:49 AM, Robert Shilston wrote:

> Marc,
> 
> We successfully run Varnish in front of a large Wordpress site and achieve a good hit rate.  At a very high level, most access is anonymous, and we simple PIPE access if there's wp-admin in the URL.  We happen to use a custom plugin to manage submitting bans to Varnish, but I believe off the shelf ones are now available.
> 
> However, undertaking putting Varnish in front of any site without a strong understanding of how the site works will not yield the best results.  Only by understanding the traffic and requests will you be able to safely get a high degree of caching.
> 
> 
> Rob
> 
> On 18 Jul 2012, at 02:35, Marc Fournier wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Okay, I'm lost here … what sort of site is Varnish good for … ?   A news web site where nobody every logs into the site … ?
>> 
>> For instance, the impression I'm getting is that you couldn't use Varnish in front of a Facebook like site, since none of the hits would be anonymous?  But would be potentially useful in front of a Slashdot like site, where alot of the hits *are* anonymous?
>> 
>> The reason I started to look at Varnish was a client asked about it in terms of the W3T Cache that is available for Wordpress … it apparently has the ability to 'invalidate cache' in a varnish server, so as to force it to reload from apache … but I don't know enough about Wordpress to know if I can even safely disable cookies, but without disabling cookies, nothing will get cached, making Varnish good as a load balancer, but losing the major benefit …
>> 
>> … no?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 2012-07-13, at 11:53 PM, Nick Tailor wrote:
>> 
>>> Also you only want anonymous visits cached. All cookies with session Id should be passed to apache and then you want look trying to setup should ur backend fail run off the cache only 
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>> On Jul 13, 2012, at 10:51 AM, Marc Fournier <lists at hub.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Morning …
>>>> 
>>>> OS: FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE #2: Mon Jul  2 21:20:02 UTC 2012
>>>> 
>>>> I am trying to use varnish as a caching front end to a wordpress site … found some wordpress specific templetes for vcl_recv / vcl_fetch, to provide me with a base, and everything starts up, and stays running fine, *until* I change my DNS to have the domain go through Varnish … and then it starts rebooting …
>>>> 
>>>> This test through, before I switched DNS, I had an uptime (according to varnish stat) of just over 1 hr … as soon as I switched DNS over, uptime kept resetting to 0, with (after switching DNS back again), I'm currently seeing:
>>>> 
>>>> 0+00:07:44 
>>>> Hitrate ratio:        0        0        0
>>>> Hitrate avg:     0.0000   0.0000   0.0000
>>>> 
>>>> And, according to ps, you can see the Child much younger then the Mgr:
>>>> 
>>>> root at lb1:/var/log # ps aux | grep varnish
>>>> www      52281  0.0  0.0 355674084  6432  ??  IJ    5:34PM   0:00.16 varnishd: Varnish-Chld lb1.hospitalityleaders.com (varnishd)
>>>> root     74714  0.0  0.0 98032  2636  ??  SsJ   4:21PM   0:00.13 varnishd: Varnish-Mgr lb1.hospitalityleaders.com (varnishd)
>>>> root     71856  0.0  0.0   540   328   2  S+J   5:44PM   0:00.00 grep varnish
>>>> 
>>>> I'm new with this, so not really sure how best to debug … I did see something from PHK in one of my searches talking about an issue with cookies … ?   But I haven't been able to re-find that posting …
>>>> 
>>>> I've also, so far, been unable to find a core file, although I'm currently running a find across the whole file system to see if there isn't one …
>>>> 
>>>> Any suggestions on where to start debugging this, or more information I can provide, would be appreciated … 
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you ...
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> varnish-misc mailing list
>>>> varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
>>>> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/mailman/listinfo/varnish-misc
>> 
>> 
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