Long Startup times and Directory Structure

[Karl Pielorz]

Hi,

We're running Bind 8.2.2-P5 under FreeBSD. We have a moderately large number
of domains (few thousand) that this server provides data for...

At the moment, all the zone files are in a single directory. FreeBSD doesn't
seem to have a problem with this - and even cd'ing to that directory and using
file name completion from the shell get's the right file, or list of files
pretty instantly...

The nameserver takes around a minute to startup - if I use a better directory
structure (e.g. by filing 'mydomain.com' under 'm/y/d/mydomain.com' - Is this
likely to cutdown the startup time? - Dramatically?

We do have to reload the nameserver quite often as we make config changes etc.
- so I was just wondering if making this change would be worth the effort
(apart from keeping the number of files in a single directory down).

Any info greatly appreciated,

-Karl Pielorz