varnish backing file gone missing

[Mark Moseley]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Matt Schurenko <MSchurenko at airg.com> wrote:
> Yeah it says "deleted" when I use lsof. Is this going to cause a problem eventually? Since the file is gone is the kernel just using RAM alone now? Swap usage hasn't increased. I'm wondering how it is continuing to function.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org [mailto:varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org] On Behalf Of Mark Moseley
> Sent: September-26-11 1:00 PM
> Cc: varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
> Subject: Re: varnish backing file gone missing
>
> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Matt Schurenko <MSchurenko at airg.com> wrote:
>> Update:
>>
>>
>>
>> I noticed that I mistakenly created a 40GB  zero-filled file rather than a
>> 48GB one:
>>
>>
>>
>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/varnish-cache bs=1G count=40
>>
>>
>>
>> Not sure if that would make any difference.
>>
>>
>>
>> Matt Schurenko
>> Systems Administrator
>>
>>
>> airG® Share Your World
>> Suite 710, 1133 Melville Street
>>
>> Vancouver, BC  V6E 4E5
>>
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>>
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>>
>> E: MSchurenko at airg.com
>>
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>>
>> From: varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org
>> [mailto:varnish-misc-bounces at varnish-cache.org] On Behalf Of Matt Schurenko
>> Sent: September-26-11 12:43 PM
>> To: varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
>> Subject: varnish backing file gone missing
>>
>>
>>
>> I just noticed that the backing file I configured varnish to use is now
>> gone:
>>
>>
>>
>> [root at mvp13 ~]# ps -ef | grep varnishd
>>
>> root      4419     1  0 Sep07 ?        00:00:00 /usr/local/sbin/varnishd -s
>> file,/tmp/varnish-cache,48G -T 127.0.0.1:2000 -a 0.0.0.0:80 -t 604800 -f
>> /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl -p http_headers 384 -p connect_timeout
>> 4.0
>>
>>
>>
>> [root at mvp13 ~]# ls /tmp/varnish-cache
>>
>> ls: /tmp/varnish-cache: No such file or directory
>>
>>
>>
>> If I do an lsof I see this:
>>
>>
>>
>> varnishd   4420 nobody    4u      REG                8,1 51539607552
>> 62160904 /tmp/varnish-cache (deleted)
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm pretty sure I never deleted it. Is this normal behaviour? What are the
>> implications of this file being removed while varnish is running? Varnishd
>> still appears to be working fine. I have another varnish server running but
>> the backing file is still there. BTW I'm running varnish version 2.1.5.
>>
>>
>>
>
> Perhaps a log rotation script deleted it? If so and varnishd is still
> running, it should show up in lsof with "(deleted)" next to the
> pathname.

It'll work as long as varnishd has it open. It'll only get released
when varnished closes it. I'd suggest moving to something like
/var/{lib,cache,run}/varnish