Is it normal to see two varnishd processes?

Question

I'm running Varnish 3.x on a RHEL5 server. After starting varnish, ps ax |grep varnish gives:

[root@ip-... ec2-user]# ps ax |grep varnish
 2747 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnish.pid -a :80 -T localhost:6082 -f /etc/varnish/idea-int.vcl -u varnish -g varnish
 2748 ?        Sl     0:00 /usr/sbin/varnishd -P /var/run/varnish.pid -a :80 -T localhost:6082 -f /etc/varnish/idea-int.vcl -u varnish -g varnish

And /var/run/varnish.pid shows 2747.

Is this normal?

Answer 1

Yes, it's normal. One handles normal connections, the other handles the admin.

You can check which is which by using netstat:

# netstat -ntlp | grep varnish
tcp    0  0 0.0.0.0:80       0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      8935/varnishd   
tcp    0  0 127.0.0.1:6082   0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      8934/varnishd   

As you can see one binds to the admin port (6082) on the loopback interface, while the other binds to the main port (80 in my case and in most).