varnish crashes

[Jeremy Hinegardner]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 11:20:49AM +0100, Angelo H?ngens wrote:
> Here's an example of a varnishd crashing, this is in /var/log/messages:
> 
> Jan 23 09:49:39 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (47479) not responding
> to ping, killing it.
> Jan 23 10:49:43 nmt-nlb-06 kernel: pid 47479 (varnishd), uid 80: exited
> on signal 3
> Jan 23 09:49:43 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (47479) not responding
> to ping, killing it.
> Jan 23 09:49:43 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (47479) not responding
> to ping, killing it.
> Jan 23 09:49:43 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: child (54810) Started
> Jan 23 09:49:48 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Pushing vcls failed: CLI
> communication error
> Jan 23 09:49:48 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (54810) said Closed
> fds: 4 5 6 7 11 12 14 15
> Jan 23 09:49:48 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (54810) said Child starts
> Jan 23 09:51:15 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (54810) said managed
> to mmap 2319266349056 bytes of 2319266349056
> Jan 23 09:51:15 nmt-nlb-06 varnishd[47478]: Child (54810) said Ready
> 
> Does anyone know what could cause this?

I have this exact same combination of issues with my varnish installation.
I am running on CentOS 5 and in my case, the child never restarted after the
Pushing vcls failed.
 
> My config file is too long to post (760kB), because of 350 backends
> declarations and 7600 host names pointing to those backends. But I can
> make an extract if someone thinks it helps them to understand my issue..

My config file was not that large, but it was larger than the default cli_buffer
setting.  On a lark, I changed my varnish startup to have -p cli_buffer=16384
which is larger than the file size of my combined vcl's and I have not had the
'Pushing vcls failed' error since.  Since this was the only configuration
parameter I changed at that point, I'm fairly sure this fixed that one error.  I
still get the 'Child not responding to ping, killing it' all the time, and I
currently have my cli_timeout set to 10.

enjoy,

-jeremy

-- 
========================================================================
 Jeremy Hinegardner                              jeremy at hinegardner.org