Varnish memory usage

[Jan-Aage Frydenbø-Bruvoll]

Dear list,

I am currently in a situation where I need to restart Varnish every
day due to memory usage spinning out of control. Would anybody on the
list be able to shed any light on what variables come into play and
how I can estimate the actual memory usage on that basis?

At the moment I have Varnish 3.0.2 running with command line parameters

/usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnishd.pid -u nobody -f
/etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,6.5G -p thread_pools 4 -p
thread_pool_max 1500 -p listen_depth 2048 -p lru_interval 1800 -h
classic,169313 -p connect_timeout 600

After a few hours of operation this leads to the following resource usage:

proxy03 jan # ps axu | grep varnish
...
nobody   25653  4.3 12.8 24646344 12734204 ?   Sl   Jan15 185:04
/usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnishd.pid ...

So far, RES will continue to rise well above this number - the worst I
have had before I had to restart in order to avoid problems on the
machine was 48GB (RES, not VIRT)

Thank you in advance for any pointers on this.

Best regards
Jan