Varnish over memory allocation

[Dridi Boukelmoune]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 8:07 AM Alex Wakefield
<AlexWakefield at fastmail.com.au> wrote:
>
> Whoops, knew I forgot to specify something!
>
> We're using malloc. Command line switch is specifically `-s malloc,24GB`

The -s option only specifies the storage size (HTTP responses with
some metadata). The rest of Varnish's memory footprint goes on top,
things like loaded VCLs, ongoing VCL transactions, all kinds of data
structures. VMODs like XKey may add their own footprint on top, the
list goes on.

Even on the storage side, if you only declare a malloc storage like
you did, you will get an unlimited Transient storage by default for
short-lived or uncacheable responses.

The only way today to tell a Varnish instance to limit itself to 24GB
(and still on a best-effort basis) is with Varnish Enterprise's memory
governor.

Dridi