Varnish child killed

[Michal Taborsky]

Hello Jean-Francois,

we have seen similar behavior. You did not specify what platform you use 
so I assume Linux. After some studying and experimentation my 
recommendation is:
a) always make sure varnish uses only memory, never disc, if you expect 
good performance. So specify the cache size smaller than the available 
memory you have (some memory should be reserved for other processes and 
some varnish control structures, we use 14G cache size on 16G box)
b) use malloc storage type

Hope this helps,
Michal


Dne 21.4.2011 10:51, Jean-Francois Laurens napsal(a):
> Hi there,
>
> We're run varnish 2.1.5 for some week now and we still do not 
> understand some behavior regarding the shared memory activity.
> We specified a --sfile,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,50G in the 
> configuration but it's impossible to go higher than 25G used by 
> varnish. Please see the following cacti graph:
>
>
>
> In addition I can see varnish doesn't seem to be able to handle more 
> than 1 million objects:
>
>
> When the child process get killed, the load of the system was very high:
> Apr 20 21:46:44 server-01-39 varnishd[21087]: Child (5372) not 
> responding to CLI, killing it.
> ....
> Apr 20 21:49:57 server-01-39 nrpe[18101]: Command completed with 
> return code 2 and output: CRITICAL -*load average: 159.00, 159.32, 
> 77.02*|load1=159.000;15.000;30.000;0; load5=159.320;10.000;25.000;0; 
> load15=77.020;5.000;20.000;0;
> ....
> Apr 20 21:48:43 server-01-39 varnishd[21087]: Child (5372) not 
> responding to CLI, killing it.
>
> All this makes me believe we have an issue with some kernel parameters 
> that do not allow varnish to handle as many objects as we configured it.
>
> Would anybody have an advice for this problem ?
>
> Jef
>
> Jean-Francois Laurens
> Ingénieur Syste`me Unix
> Resources et Développement
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>

-- 
Michal Táborský
chief systems architect
Netretail Holding, B.V.
http://www.nrholding.com

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