bind9 & multiprocessing

[Bob Halley]

Jeffrey Cioli <jcioli at cisco.com> writes:

> i have been experimenting w/ bind9 regarding ddns. 
> i noticed a couple of things regarding performance.
> first, bind9's performance is very similar to bind8.
> i would think that the multithreading capability of bind9
> would help. i ran my tests on both a uni-cpu sparc-u5 
> (333 mhz) and a dual-cpu e250 (400 mhz each). i actually 
> saw performance decreased on the dual-cpu e250. i would 
> expect performance to increase. but, then ddns is io bound 
> due to the journeling. 
> 
> is multithreading and multiprocessor support enabled for
> bind9 b1 ???

Yes.  Did you start the server with '-n 2'?  If you have multiple
processors, you need to use the '-n' option to tell BIND 9 how many
you have, so it can create an appropriate number of worker threads.

Also, beta 1 doesn't yet call pthread_setconcurrency() or
thr_setconcurrency() on Solaris, so that might be causing problems
too.

If all of your updates are to the same zone, you're going to see a
limited benefit from the multiple CPUs, because all of the updates to
any given zone are serialized.

/Bob