Memory spreading, then stop responding

[Darryl Dixon - Winterhouse Consulting]

> 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.
>

Hi Rob,

There have been a few threads about this now on this mailing list.
Probably it relates to the use of purge_url in your VCL. Are you using
this function at all?

regards,
Darryl Dixon
Winterhouse Consulting Ltd
http://www.winterhouseconsulting.com