Bind 9.3.0 strange behavior with memory on EL3

[nathan r. hruby]

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Michael Lang wrote:

[snip]

> the didnt show up, earlyer (these log entrys have some time between, but
> on the critical time there where 250 Entrys in one second)
>
> I didnt find anything about such a problem on the Lists.
> Any suggestions ?
>

When you say "EL3" so you mean "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3"?  If so,
please try upgrading to the Update 3 release (specifically the
2.4.21-20.EL) kernel.  Previous release had had issues very similar to
this which the UPD3 kernel corrects (mostly).

If you can't do that try reading the VM Tuning whitepaper found here:
http://people.redhat.com/nhorman/papers/rhel3_vm.pdf
This should give your some tips to keep the kernel from doing what it's
doing.  Specifically you probably want to lower the aggressiveness of the
caching going on in the kernel (eg: the kernel is caching way more than it
should which sends apps to disk when they shouldn't be).

And a stopgap measure would be to do a "swapoff -a" which will keep the
kernel from swapping madly.

If you're already running UPD3 take a look at this buglet:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=132639

If you course, you're not running RHEL 3, please excuse the noise :)

HTH,

-n
-- 
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nathan hruby <nhruby at uga.edu>
uga enterprise information technology services
production systems support
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