How many zones running BIND ??

[Greg Rumple]

* Kevin Darcy (kcd at daimlerchrysler.com) [020110 23:25]:
> Are there any success stories for this kind of thing? (Nate's example of
> alias databases is, I think, inappropriate since that's not a situation
> where the database is loaded entirely from disk into core; rather it's
> just a more optimized form of disk-based database access, an animal of
> quite a different stripe).

I can state factually that about 3-4 years ago I worked for a web
hosting company, that managed to get bind up to about 110,000 zones
(before I left).  This problem of startup loading time (our fastest box
at the time was a P2-300 with 256 megs of ram (well we had SGI and
Solaris boxes, but they weren't nearly as fast at running Bind)) was
significant for us.  I spent a lot of time optimizing it (I got it to a
point where basically I was disk I/O bound, but even that was still to
slow (25 minutes versus the 2+ hours it was taking when I started
working with it)), even going as far as implementing a way to dump the
in memory database to disk, and basically to restore it upon startup,
and than just doing a rescan like on a SIGHUP (this still took a good
bit of time none the less).  This was on the early versions of Bind 8
unfortunately, and hardware has gotten a whole lot faster since than.

As for Bind 9, it would proably not be all that hard to implement a SDB
module to do what you want, doing some kind of compile of the zone files
into some kind of database (berkeley DB, red black trees, whatever), but
again the benefit is unclear.  But that's what the SDB interface is
therefore, to allow you the benefit of trying this out.

Greg

-- 
Greg Rumple
grumple at zaphon.llamas.net