Varnish crashing in production

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Barry Abrahamson <barry at automattic.com> writes:
> We are currently testing Varnish as a reverse proxy to serve images.
> We are running into problems where the varnishd child (and sometimes
> parent), will die unexpectedly.  When the child process dies, the
> parent restarts it and when the parent process dies, it is restarted
> by our monitoring systems.  Sometimes this happens every 5 minutes,
> sometimes it can stay running up to 2 hours.  I don't see any pattern
> as to when it is failing.  In our development environment, with no
> "real" traffic, but the same configuration, we are unable to
> replicate the crash.  The vcl file we are using is basically the
> default one, except in the fetch subroutine, the we only insert
> objects if they have a certain header and pass everything else.  The
> core dumps created as a result of the crash all show this:

1.0.3 has a known bug which will cause the child process to crash if
something unexpected happens while retrieving an object from the
backend.  Please try again with the tip of the 1.0 branch.

> Program terminated with signal 6, Aborted.

That's an assertion failure.  If you run the management process in the
foreground (start varnishd manually with -d -d, then type "start" to
kick off the child process) you should see an error message when the
child dies.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Senior Software Developer
Linpro AS - www.linpro.no