Memory spreading, then stop responding

[Rob S]

Hi,

Here's my setup:

[root at varnish1 ~]# rpm -qa |grep varnish
varnish-libs-2.0.4-1.el5
varnish-2.0.4-1.el5
[root at varnish1 ~]# uname -a
Linux varnish1.example.com 2.6.18-128.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jan 21 10:41:14 EST 
2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root at varnish1 ~]# ps aux |grep varnishd
root     27993  0.0  0.0 106472   816 ?        Ss   17:42   0:00 
/usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnish.pid -a 10.1.2.51:80 -T :6082 -f 
/etc/varnish/default.vcl -u varnish -g varnish -s 
file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,1G
varnish  28063  0.9  1.0 1474728 62860 ?       Sl   17:43   0:06 
/usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnish.pid -a 10.1.2.51:80 -T :6082 -f 
/etc/varnish/default.vcl -u varnish -g varnish -s 
file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,1G
root     28799  0.0  0.0  61192   732 pts/3    S+   17:56   0:00 grep 
varnishd

The problem that I've encountered twice now is the following:

1) Varnish spreads to use over 8GB of swap, despite appearing to be 
configured to only use 1GB of storage
2) Our automated monitoring indicates that we're running out of swap space.
3) Restart varnish
4) From this point, varnishlog and varnishncsa return no output.

Can anyone suggest why varnish is using more memory than it's allocated, 
and why varnishlog would stop returning any output?  Varnishlog was 
writing to disk, so I can probably extract the end of that, if it's of use.

Very grateful to anyone who can point me in the right direction.




Rob