segfaults with varnish 2.1 on Ubuntu

[Alex Hooper]

Hi,

We've been running varnish for the last few years on a RHEL box and it has been 
very stable -- I don't recall ever having to restart the service.

The version we ran there was:

# varnishd -V
varnishd (varnish-2.1.3 SVN 5049:5055)
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Linpro AS / Verdens Gang AS

It was run with these params:

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
              -T localhost:6082 \
              -f /usr/local/etc/varnish/bmjgroup.vcl \
              -s file,/var/varnish \
              -n /var/varnish"


and the system was

   - OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Tikanga)
   - RAM: 16 GB

We have recently migrated to a virtualised platform and are now running varnish 
on a VM running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS. This also has 16GB RAM. The version is 
slightly lower than the previous (as the preference is to use the packaged 
version rather than roll our own):

$ varnishd -V
varnishd (varnish-2.1 SVN )
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Linpro AS / Verdens Gang AS

It is started with these params:

NFILES=131072 # (used for ulimit -n)
MEMLOCK=82000 # (used for ulimit -l)
DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
              -T localhost:6082 \
              -f /etc/varnish/bmjgroup.vcl \
              -s file,/var/lib/varnish/$INSTANCE \
              -n varnish-01"


We are encountering a problem with the new instance which will run fine for 
about a week and then start to give random errors, generally just resetting the 
connection to clients. At this point, trying to examine the running process with 
varnishlog or varnishstat results in the tool instantly segfaulting. Restarting 
the server fixes everything until it happens again

I'm a little unsure as to the best place to start looking as I try to fix this 
(admittedly partly as I'm dealing with a large mopping-up exercise after 
migrating out entire production environment) so wondered whether anyone might 
have any suggestions.

Cheers,

Alex.
-- 
Alex Hooper
Operations Team Leader, BMJ Group, BMA House, London WC1H 9JR
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7383 6049
http://group.bmj.com/

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