Backend polling not working

[Izak Burger]

Hi all,

I tried varnish today for the first time. This happened after we 
upgraded to a newer version of squid and it hung itself in an infinite 
loop. But that is a different story.

We want to use varnish to front a number of zope backends, all of which 
speak to the same database backend (so they serve the same content). The 
problem with this zope application is that it takes a long time to 
reload. Those who know plone knows it is very heavy on the catalog, and 
in our case it means that after restarting a backend, it can take up to 
15 minutes for the caches to warm up again. During this time, we would 
like the zope backends to be marked as sick and not be used.

Unfortunately this does not seem to work in version 2.0.4 (which seems 
the most recent if I check your svn tags). The odd thing is this: it 
seems that the probe succeeds, but zope's access log shows that zero 
bytes is transferred, eg:

10.0.0.12 - Anonymous [14/Oct/2009:18:38:38 +0200] "GET /plonesite 
HTTP/1.1" 200 0 ""

Note the zero after the 200 status. I suspect this causes a problem on 
line 220 of bin/varnishd/cache_backend_poll.c, where rlen is the length 
of data read from zope:

         if (rlen == 0)
                 return;

The result of this is a sick backend, eg:

  0 Backend_health - live1 Still sick 4--X-S--- 0 2 3 0.000000 0.000000

Using wireshark to log at the network traffic confirms that the HTTP 
request is sent, but no response, corresponding with the access log.

This seems very similar to this report:
http://projects.linpro.no/pipermail/varnish-dev/2009-February/002086.html

Has anyone seen this problem before? Perhaps there is a fix in svn 
already? I could not see anything that looked promising while looking 
through the subversion logs.

regards,
Izak