Follow-up to BIND upper limits questions

[Mark_Andrews at isc.org]

> 
> 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?

	You can reload individual via ndc with 8.2.1
> 
> 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.

	BIND 9 will be multi threaded, it should be able to do this.
> 
> 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 con
> fig
>    file. And is it possibly to prevent this forking in the hope of improving
>    performance of the reloads?

	BIND only forks at two places:

	1. after the initial load as it backgrounds itself
	2. to start named-xfer

	A reload is likely to trigger 2.

	Mark
> 
> Walter Chick
> Boston Light Software
> 
--
Mark Andrews, Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org