RBL and BIND seem to be causing outages

[Danny Mayer]

At 03:47 AM 4/22/02, Karl Auer wrote:

>We've just started obtaining the RBL zone, so our mailservers can reduce
>the amount of SPAM we have to wade through.
>
>We have noticed that the transfer of the zone is relatively quick, even
>though it's about 17MB in size. However, processing the received zone
>seems to put a major load on the BIND server (8.2.5-REL), resulting in
>quite a few queries timing out. Once the zone has been loaded, all is
>well again.
>
>Can anyone with experience loading large zones comment? Can we perhaps
>prioritise the loading somehow? Or is the only way out to add grunt to
>the server hardware?
>
>Regards, K.
>karl.auer at id.ethz.ch

Upgrade to BIND 9.2.x and use the multi-threading option.  It will continue
to respond to queries while loading any zone.  You didn't mention what O/S
or hardware you have.

         Danny