Docunext

I'm a big fan of Varnish. It makes HTTP redundancy a lot easier, even for small networks like mine.

I've previously felt that 256MB or more RAM was necessary, but I'm experimenting with a setup now that seems to work.

Here's my setup:

• CentOS 5 minimal - uses only about 8MB of RAM out of the box
• NGINX on port 80 - uses very little RAM; 2MB?
• Varnish on localhost:6081 - uses a lot, but can be limited

Here's the /etc/sysconfig/varnish file I'm using:

DAEMON_OPTS="-a localhost:6081 \
             -T localhost:6082 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -w 1,4,10 \
             -p sess_timeout=2 \
             -p thread_pools=3 \
             -p first_byte_timeout=300 \
             -u varnish -g varnish \
             -s file,/var/lib/varnish/varnish_storage.bin,1G"

I'm running this on an OpenVZ container. Seems to work OK.

Memory usage:

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           128        116         11          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:        116         11
Swap:            0          0          0

UPDATE: Today, about two days after I originally wrote this post, I tried to ssh into this machine and was greeted with an ssh error. I think it was starving for memory. I was able to reboot it, but I guess its just not happening.

¥