Hash director and backend health

[Thiago Figueiro]

Hi, all.

I'm experimenting with the hash director but the current documentation[1] is brief and I need some help. (background: our application servers do some local fragment caching and this is more efficient if the URLs go to servers which already have the necessary fragments).

As desired, the hash director is selecting the same backend for a given URL.  However, when the backend goes sick, I expect varnish to pick a healthy one; instead I get a 503 due to no backend available.

This is the backend definition:

director example hash {
	.retries = 5;
        { .backend = server1; .weight = 1; }
(...)
        { .backend = server8; .weight = 1; }
}

I assumed the "retries" parameter in the director definition would try different backends; it might be that it retries the same backend.

It could be relevant that my vcl_fetch has:

sub vcl_fetch {
(...)
        # If status not one of the below try again (up to max_restarts)
        if (
        beresp.status != 200 && beresp.status != 403 && beresp.status != 404 &&
        beresp.status != 301 && beresp.status != 302 && beresp.status != 307 &&
        beresp.status != 410) {
                if (req.http.X-Forwarded-Host) {
                         set req.http.Host = req.http.X-Forwarded-Host;
                }

                restart;
        }


To overcome this I thought about defining a random director with the same set of servers and, should the hash director fail, I'd update req.backend to use the random director.  I don't like this too much because it would double the number of health checks, which are not exactly cheap, and I would need to complicate the VCL a bit more.

Am I missing something?  Is there a better way of handling this situation?


Thanks.


[1] https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/reference/vcl.html#the-hash-director
  

Thiago Figueiro
Technical Operations Manager

Westfield Digital Business
T +61 (0)2 9358 7123
M +61 (0)405 700 814
W www.westfield.com.au
E tfigueiro at au.westfield.com






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