Problem with admin_menu and Varnish I'm a beginner with configuring varnish, so my apologies if this is a stupid question. I am trying to make things work on my ubuntu VM (12.04) with Varnish 3.

I am facing a problem, where after I log in, the admin menu (created by admin_menu) just disappears. Looking at the ajax request, it seems that varnish sends the request to drupal, receives a valid answer and then just refuses to serve it. It just outputs a 503 error instead.

I have captured the varnish logs, but I'm not sure what to make of them. Anyone has any ideas?

    11 ReqStart     c 192.168.1.20 50807 2144510792
   11 RxRequest    c GET
   11 RxURL        c /js/admin_menu/cache/a4270b058219f623d092552467a5cde0
   11 RxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 RxHeader     c Host: www.giftmonkey.ubuntu
   11 RxHeader     c User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
   11 RxHeader     c Accept: text/plain, */*; q=0.01
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
   11 RxHeader     c X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
   11 RxHeader     c Referer: http://www.giftmonkey.ubuntu/
   11 RxHeader     c Cookie: __utma=94903434.1646672653.1383344251.1383344251.1383390432.2; __utmz=94903434.1383344251.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); has_js=1; pmcwidth=1920; __utmc=94903434; SESS9433506a0f068ea0ad220f58b963eef8=6FfRyBpNYYBlufL7y6AoBa5eqBP
   11 RxHeader     c Connection: keep-alive
   11 VCL_call     c recv pass
   11 VCL_call     c hash
   11 Hash         c /js/admin_menu/cache/a4270b058219f623d092552467a5cde0
   11 Hash         c www.giftmonkey.ubuntu
   11 VCL_return   c hash
   11 VCL_call     c pass pass
   11 Backend      c 17 default default
   11 TTL          c 2144510792 RFC 31536000 -1 -1 1383409657 0 1383409657 0 31536000
   11 VCL_call     c fetch
   11 TTL          c 2144510792 VCL 120 -1 -1 1383409657 -0
   11 VCL_return   c hit_for_pass
   11 ObjProtocol  c HTTP/1.1
   11 ObjResponse  c OK
   11 ObjHeader    c Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 16:27:37 GMT
   11 ObjHeader    c Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
   11 ObjHeader    c X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.10-1ubuntu3.8
   11 ObjHeader    c Expires: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 11:17:03 +0000
   11 ObjHeader    c Last-Modified: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 11:17:04 +0000
   11 ObjHeader    c Cache-Control: private, max-age=31536000
   11 ObjHeader    c ETag: "1383391024-1"
   11 ObjHeader    c X-Drupal-Cache: HIT
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Language: ro
   11 ObjHeader    c Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Encoding: gzip
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Length: 6705
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
   11 FetchError   c Junk after gzip data
   11 Gzip         c u F - 6611 59085 80 80 52818
   11 VCL_call     c error deliver
   11 VCL_call     c deliver deliver
   11 TxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 TxStatus     c 503
   11 TxResponse   c Service Unavailable
   11 TxHeader     c Server: Varnish
   11 TxHeader     c Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
   11 TxHeader     c Retry-After: 5
   11 TxHeader     c Content-Length: 436
   11 TxHeader     c Accept-Ranges: bytes
   11 TxHeader     c Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 16:27:37 GMT
   11 TxHeader     c X-Varnish: 2144510792
   11 TxHeader     c Age: 0
   11 TxHeader     c Via: 1.1 varnish
   11 TxHeader     c Connection: close
   11 TxHeader     c X-Cache: MISS
   11 Length       c 436
   11 ReqEnd       c 2144510792 1383409657.339800358 1383409657.400331020 0.511597395 0.060457230 0.000073433
   11 SessionClose c error
   11 StatSess     c 192.168.1.20 50807 2 1 5 0 5 4 1760 6926
The error see to be on some cache file of drupal's admin_menu. The js aggregated file browser is requesting is being refused by Drupal by 503. You may get some pointers to this issue here https://groups.drupal.org/node/28604

Try clearing all the Drupal caches using "drush cc all" command. Are you using any js aggregation on Drupal side? Try changing to https://drupal.org/project/advagg?