varnish high load average and dropped http session

[Joel A. Chornik]

Hi,

 

When handling a request for a large file (~300mb) varnish just closes the
http connection and as a side effect, load average on the Server pikes.

Hitting on that file just a few times a minute is enough to get 200LA on a
Sun x2250 with 4GB RAM.

 

Varnish is configured with a relatively small file cache of 2.7GB, but
anyhow it should not fail this way.

 

On a similar 64bit Server but with 7GB file cache configured, the file gets
Server without problem.

 

Tried on varnish 2.0.3 with different file sizes (above 300mb) and
extensiones (.tar, .mp3. .htm)

 

The log reports:

 

varnishd[28124]: Child (7003) Panic message: Assert error in STV_alloc(),
stevedore.c line 71:   Condition((st) != NULL) not true.  errno = 107
(Transport endpoint is not connected)  thread = (cache-worker)sp =
0x7f87a7ff2008 {   fd = 1134, id = 1134, xid = 1972308839,   client =
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1433,   step = STP_FETCH,   handling = discard,   ws =
0x7f87a7ff2078 {      id = "sess",     {s,f,r,e} =
{0x7f87a7ff2808,,+308,(nil),+16384},   },     worker = 0x7724ebd0 {     },
vcl = {       srcname = {         "input",         "Default",       },
},   obj = 0x7f87ec179000 {     refcnt = 1, xid = 1972308839,     ws =
0x7f87ec179028 {        id = "obj",       {s,f,r,e} =
{0x7f87ec179358,,+251,(nil),+7336},     },     http = {       ws =
0x7f87ec179028 {          id = "obj",         {s,f,r,e} =
{0x7f87ec179358,,+251,(nil),+7336},       },       hd = {         "Date:
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:30:15 GMT",         "Server: Apache",
"Last-Modified: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:57:11 GMT",

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-dev/attachments/20090327/d2f526aa/attachment-0002.html>