varnishd restarting randomly

[Glenn-Erik Sandbakken]

Theres nothing about grace in the vcl configuration used, so if grace is
not default we're not using grace.
I have never experienced any problems with other applications/processes
running on www.mp3lyrics.com
If it's due to bad ram then I guess the only solution is switching to a new
server if we wan't to continue using varnish?
Attached is the default.vcl varnish configuration used.

- Glenn-Erik
(ps I changed my varnish mailinglist email address)

2012/4/23 Jonathan Matthews <contact at jpluscplusm.com>:
> Hey Glenn -
>
> I'm not replying on-list as I'm in a rush, not able to give you
> anything definitive, and you sound like you're in a jam,
> operationally.
> Here're my 2 ideas for you from my sysadmin PoV:
>
> 1) Dodgy RAM (or other hardware; but most likely RAM). My #1
> suggestion from what you've described.
>
> 2) Are you using "grace"? It has some undocumented (except on the
> list) flaw where it gobbles more and more and more RAM, eventually
> leading to something going wrong somewhere.
>
> Anyway, HTH.
> Jonathan
>
> On 23 April 2012 10:13, glenn at mp3lyrics.org <glenn at mp3lyrics.org> wrote:
>> We've been running varnish on www.mp3lyrics.com for many years,
>> there has been a problem with varnish restarting at random intervals.
>> Some times varnish can work for several days before it automatically
>> restarts (but its rare), and some times it restarts up to 10 times per
>> day (more "normal").
>> It does not seem to have anything to do with traffic amount.
>> This is starting to get annoying and we've reached the point where we
>> want to either fix the problem with varnish or get another cache
>> machine.
>> Last night varnish didn't restart, but it seems it kind of froze. It
>> didn't fetch data from the webserver, and didn't respond to
>> http-requsts from the net (this is the first time I've experienced a
>> varnish freeze like this)
>> When it froze, all I had to do was to manually restart it, then it
>> started running "normally" again.
>>
>> I am unsure whether varnish responds slowly to http-requests from the
>> net during the automatic restarts or not, but I have come across
>> situations when varnish is starting to respond slowly, then I restart
>> it and it starts responding quick again.
>> This behavior seems totally random, but I have noticed that varnish
>> can seem slow when very many url.purge commands have been sent to it.
>> However, the automatic restarting does not seem to have anything to do
>> with the amount of url.purges sent to varnish (but I can be wrong).
>>
>> mp3lyrics is a fairly big site, it has several millions (cacheable)
>> pages, about 200.000 unique users per day, about 300.000 pageviews,
>> and about 4mill varnish requests per day.
>> The server is in no way overloaded, apache alone is very capable of
>> handling the requests, but a cache machine is off course wanted anyway
>> if it works correctly.
>> Currently varnish has been given 16GB of ram, I've tried with
>> different amounts, but the problem seems to be the same.
>>
>> I need some help to figure out where to start looking for the reason to
this.
>> If someone could tell me what kind of server type / configuration and
>> varnish stats / configuration data is needed to start searching for
>> the reason I'll be happy to provide it.
>>
>> (or should this request go to the varnish-bugs mailinglist?)
>>
>> - Glenn-Erik Sandbakken
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> varnish-misc mailing list
>> varnish-misc at varnish-cache.org
>> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/mailman/listinfo/varnish-misc
>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Matthews
> Oxford, London, UK
> http://www.jpluscplusm.com/contact.html
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