varnishd restarting randomly

[Glenn-Erik Sandbakken]

We're running varnish version 2.0.2 on FreeBSD 7.0
Varnish has been installed with the freebsd ports method, and upgraded once.
It is several years since we upgraded varnish, and it was upgraded in the
effort of fixing this problem, without luck.

There is no panic.show option in the varnishadm console:
*panic.show*
*101 44      *
*Unknown request.*

I will upgrade varnish with the ports method on the server asap, and hope
it remedies the situation.

BTW: The mp3lyrics.com server where varnish is running is a 64Bit XEON with
32GB ram and 8 processors.
The much less powerful server we used prior to the current was a 32Bit XEON
with 8GB ram (using a PAE kernel method to overcome the 4GB address limit)
with 2 processors.
On the previous server we were also running varnish and this was not a
problem !
One of the main reasons for the server switch was to get more ram for
varnish.

Usually varnish operates at very low cpu usage (even though traffic is
high), but some times it uses 100% or more cpu for several minutes.
I'm not sure what varnish is working on during these high cpu usage
periods, but it seems that this is when it sometimes restarts (but not
always, sometimes it reduces the cpu usage without restarting).
In addition, during the high cpu usage periods, sometimes the web response
from varnish on mp3lyrics is slow (seemingly due to varnish working), and
some times it seems quick despite the high cpu usage.
I have no idea for a reason to any of this strange behavior, I used to
think it was normal that varnish periodically used much cpu to create
indexes or whatever, but there's clearly something that is not working
right when it restarts so often.

- Glenn-Erik
http://www.mp3lyrics.com/


2012/4/23 Andreas Plesner Jacobsen <apj at mutt.dk>

> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 01:05:49PM +0200, Glenn-Erik Sandbakken wrote:
>
> > > 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.
>
> I'd like to hear more about this, since I can't recognize what you're
> describing, and if there's a bug, it should be in the tracker.
>
> --
> Andreas
>
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>
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