BIND crashing on a regular basis

[Nicholas Berry]

On nearly a daily basis, my primary name server dies (usually due to the one of the two errors listed below) which in turn I have to run a crontab process call upon a named checking script to ensure that I have named running as much as possible.

Here are the error messages that named is dumping to syslogd.
Jan 24 22:49:32 ns1 named[8582]: savestr: memget failed (Cannot allocate memory)
Jan 25 12:43:22 ns1 named[23471]: savedata: memget

I do not have any memory limits set (first thing that I changed).  I'm running a PIII 550 with 256 megs of PC100 RAM.  I wouldn't think that memory would be an issue.  The name server is servicing approximately 12,000 zone files and acts as a caching name server.  I might have been lead to believe that it was due to hardware limitations, but I have been running into this issue since the last server, a Pentium 233 with 128 megs of RAM.

Any ideas?

-=- Nicholas Berry
-=- nberry at corp.jps.net
-=- Cisco Engineer
-=- Network Operations
-=- JPSNet, a OneMain.com company