varnish constant hdd write

[Per Buer]

Hi.

There have been changes in both the FreeBSD and Linux vm in recent
years and the file backend doesn't perform as good on rotating hard
drives as it used to. Modern virtual machines seem to be much more
aggressive when writing.

I would recommend you try using malloc or getting a SSD. Or try going
back to RHEL4 or FreeBSD 6. :-)

Per.

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Alex F <alex at acasa.ro> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Yesterday I compiled and installed varnish 2.1.2 instead of my old 2.0.5 as
> it was randomly failing.
> Now, the new varnish is constantly writing with 1-2megs to my HDD, which in
> turn causes 100% iowait, constant load of 10-20, random timeouts.
> My VCL was unchanged.
> The thing is that I do not know if the old varnish was constantly writing to
> my HDD, I started being aware of this problem because of the high load and
> timeouts, which I did not have until today.
>
> Varnish has 1.6GB of virtual memory allocated, 3500 hits, and 119.000 cached
> objects. I have started it using "-s
> file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,2G". Is there any better
> alternative?
> Also, my machine has ran out of ram, should I decrease the allocated memory?
> free -m
>               total        used     free    shared     buffers    cached
> Mem:          3950   3891     58           0         29         2155
> -/+ buffers/cache:   1706    2243
> Swap:       3999       22      3977
>
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>



-- 
Per Buer,  Varnish Software
Phone: +47 21 54 41 21 / Mobile: +47 958 39 117 / skype: per.buer