Varnish Memory Consumption

[Chaim Keren Tzion]

Thanks Tolle!,

Comments inline below:



----- Original Message ----
> From: Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at linpro.no>
> To: varnish-misc at projects.linpro.no
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 12:29:16 PM
> Subject: Re: Varnish Memory Consumption
> 
> ]] Chaim Keren Tzion 
> 
> | I'm running Varnish -r2626 on CentOS 5.2
> | 
> | The problem I'm having is that Varnish eats up all 16GB of RAM that I
> | have and then fills up the 2GB Swap space. Also, one of the three
> | Varnish machines I have is a Virtual Machine (8GB RAM +2GB Swap). The
> | VM panics some time after the Swap fills up and becomes
> | unresponsive. The hardware machines keep on running.
> | 
> | My questions are:
> | 
> | Regarding the memory consumption:
> | Is this normal?
> 
> Yes, fairly normal, given that you've given Varnish ~91G to use.  Apart
> from the crashing, that is.  It shouldn't crash the virtual machine (but
> then, that's a bug in your kernel rather than Varnish).

The VM doesn't actually have a kernel panic. It just starts throws complaints about swap space to the console and won't allow logins or ssh.
 
> | Do I need to enlarge my Swap?
> 
> swap shouldn't really matter with mmap.
> 
> | Do I have to define a storage file that is less than the RAM+Swap that
> | I can give to Varnish, in order to ensure that they don't get filled
> | up? Should I switch to malloc? Will an upgrade to a newer revision
> | help?
> 
> I'd recommend trying a swap partition the same size as the backing file
> you use today and going with malloc and see if the problem then goes
> away.

Actually on the VM the swap file is 2G and the backing file is 2.5G. Close, but I will try with a smaller backing file.

> 
> | Regarding the Virtual Machine:
> | Is there a way to protect the Virtual Machine?
> | It it a bad idea to use a Virtual Machine?
> 
> Which virtualisation environment are you using?

VMware ESX 3.5

> 
> -- 
> Tollef Fog Heen 
> Redpill Linpro -- Changing the game!
> t: +47 21 54 41 73
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