How many zones running BIND ??

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Kevin" == Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> writes:

    >> Nate Campi wrote:

    >> I often wonder why BIND 9 doesn't allow a compiled binary db to
    >> be loaded from disk, instead of being compiled and loaded
    >> (only) into memory at each startup. 

If you feel this is a worthwhile feature, feel free to implement it or
throw enough money at ISC to persuade them to implement it for you.

    >> Seems like a rewrite would be the time to get this right.

No. BIND9 has a clean separation between the protocol engine (the
thing that makes and answers queries) from the back-end data store.
It shouldn't be too hard for a clueful programmer to use the BIND9
library to "compile" a conventional zone file into a red-black tree
(or some other data structure) for reading directly into memory. Or
mmap()'ing the file, etc, etc. 

    Kevin> I doubt that this "feature" would be worth the
    Kevin> effort. Frozen config files in sendmail sucked.

BIND is not sendmail. So just because their implementation in sendmail
"sucked" (your words) doens't necessarily mean that this would be true
for an implementation in BIND. If one existed of course. I do agree
that the feature is probably not worth the effort. It would probably
only be a significant win for massive zones. And even then it's
debatable. Loading the zone might be faster, but it will take time to
convert it to a binary format. So the elapsed time from making a
change and having it in the server will probably be about the same.
And before anyone whines about faster zone loading, this is not so
important in BIND9 because it is threaded. The server can talk and
chew gum at the same time. So while it is loading a big (text) zone
file, the server can still be answering queries.