Troubleshooting Varnish

Sometimes Varnish misbehaves. In order for you to understand whats going on there are a couple of places you can check. varnishlog, /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages are all places where varnish might leave clues of whats going on.

When Varnish won’t start

Sometimes Varnish wont start. There is a pletphora of reasons why Varnish wont start on your machine. We’ve seen everything from wrong permissions on /dev/null to other processses blocking the ports.

Starting Varnish in debug mode to see what is going on.

Try to start varnish by:

# varnishd -f /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,1G -T 127.0.0.1:2000  -a 0.0.0.0:8080 -d

Notice the -d option. It will give you some more information on what is going on. Let us see how Varnish will react to something else listening on its port.:

# varnishd -n foo -f /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,1G -T 127.0.0.1:2000  -a 0.0.0.0:8080 -d
storage_malloc: max size 1024 MB.
Using old SHMFILE
Platform: Linux,2.6.32-21-generic,i686,-smalloc,-hcritbit
200 193
-----------------------------
Varnish HTTP accelerator CLI.
-----------------------------
Type 'help' for command list.
Type 'quit' to close CLI session.
Type 'start' to launch worker process.

Now Varnish is running. Only the master process is running, in debug mode the cache does not start. Now you’re on the console. You can instruct the master process to start the cache by issuing “start”.:

start
bind(): Address already in use
300 22
Could not open sockets

And here we have our problem. Something else is bound to the HTTP port of Varnish. If this doesn’t help try strace or truss or come find us on IRC.

Varnish is crashing

When varnish goes bust.

Varnish gives me Guru meditation

First find the relevant log entries in varnishlog. That will probably give you a clue.

Varnish doesn’t cache

See Achieving a high hitrate.