Follow-up to BIND upper limits questions

[Walter Chick]

I'm making some progress trying to tune BIND 8.2.1 to handle a config file
with a large number of zone directives (in the 1 million range). By playing
with NEWZONES I have managed to get a reload of a config file with 500000
zones to happen in just over 3 minutes on a dual CPU Ultra 60 w/ 2 GB of RAM.
In the hopes that I can improve things further I have the following questions:

1) Can BIND be instructed to incrementally load new zones rather than have to
   digest the entire config file to pick up a few new zones?

2) Is there any way to get an answer out of BIND while it is reloading? When I
   do a nslookup during a reload it hangs until the reload has completed.

3) Why does BIND apparently fork itself when encountering a large config file?
   I wind up with two named processes after confronting BIND with a large config
   file. And is it possibly to prevent this forking in the hope of improving
   performance of the reloads?

Walter Chick
Boston Light Software