varnish restarting sporadically... cache being lost.

[Alexander Staubo]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 19:25, Ben Nowacky <bnowacky at competitorgroup.com> wrote:
> - Deployed varnish on 1 of our servers yesterday for final testing on the
> live site. Runs along well, seems to be doing great. Run varnishstat to keep
> an eye on it, and randomly all the stats reset back to 0, and there's a full
> cache purge, which means i'm guessing varnish has restarted?

Yes. The Varnish monitoring process is killing the main process
because it's not responding to its pings. This thread might be
helpful:

  http://lists.varnish-cache.org/pipermail/varnish-misc/2010-July/004399.html

As for why it is not responding to pings, that's the confusing part.
Even on what I would consider low load (200-300 reqs/s), Varnish was
being sporadically unresponsive to the point of causing other
processes to lag.

We solved the problem first by increasing the ping timeout to some
obscenely high number. Varnish will still become unresponsive at
times, but it will not be killed by the parent process when that
happens.