mass purge causes high load?

[Sascha Ottolski]

Hi,

I just needed to get rid of about 27,000 stale URLs, that were cached as 
404 or 302 due to a configuration error on the backends.

So I did a url.purge in a loop, sleeping 0.1 seconds after each URL:

for i in `cat notfound.txt.sorted` ; do varnishadm -T:81 url.purge $i; 
sleep 0.1; done

However, after about half of it I needed to stop, cause the varnish 
servers have a high load (about 30, dropping only very slowly), and the 
response time is bad (more or less 20 seconds per request :-()

May the purge be the cause? I stopped the purge 45 min. ago, and still 
the high load and slow responses. Any way to see what is going on 
inside? sometimes the load even goes up, I see a 50 now :-( The traffic 
that comes in is normal for this time of day, and usually the load 
stays below 3, response time way under a second.

I don't like the idea of performing a restart, don't want to lose the 
cache...


Thanks a lot,

Sascha