Child Died

[maillists0 at gmail.com]

I just started my first instance of varnish in production. Within 12 hours,
there were alerts from our monitoring system that Varnish was taking 90% of
the cpu. Right after that, I find these messages in /var/log/messages,
several times over a 2 minute period:

varnishd[12461]: Child (20086) not responding to ping, killing it.

The child restarted, and the stats and cache all disappeared.

This is a machine with 8 gigs of ram and a pair of slightly older quad core
xeons. The storage method is file with a 50 gig limit. At its peak, the
machine is serving around 40 requests a second, about 5000k a second. The
configs are the defaults.

What should my first steps be to troubleshoot this? Is there a likely
culprit?
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