Bind 9 Limiting factors

[Steven B. Parsons]

Jim - Thanks for not beating me up too much & the quick response :)

I have 7 bind 8 servers doing forward first to this bind 9 server.

What I really wish to accomplish is to have this server cache as much
data as possible so that when the other servers request info from it
the bind 9 server will allready have the needed info and not have to
go out to the internet and look it up (obviously unless it expired).

Im also trying to determine If I need to throw anymore HW at this box
to get better performance & more cached data & lastly if there are any 
other setting I can change to do that.

Currently this is a caching only server.

I just find it weird that the box is only using 640 megs while I still
show more recursion's then success's in the logs but its not caching
anymore data even though the memory is available.

Ive had some bind 8 servers grow to 900megs before on the named process
with same HW & OS version.

Jim> Eh? What have views got to do with BIND9's "limiting factors"? And
Jim> what limiting factors are you trying to find?

Has nothing to do with it other then the fact Id be using bind 8 if it 
had that feature which I will be using later.  Sorry to confuse.

Steven B. Parsons

success 23986641
referral 978
nxrrset 522683
nxdomain 11843193
recursion 32302978
failure 9816202





Jim Reid wrote:
>>>>>>"Steven" == Steven B Parsons <sparsons at columbus.rr.com> writes:
>>>>>
> 
>     Steven> Ok Bind experts Ive done some research and have not found
>     Steven> much so whatever info you can give me is going to be very
>     Steven> much appreciated. Bind 8 is what I am familiar with mostly
>     Steven> but the bind 9 view's feature is what I need.
> 
> Eh? What have views got to do with BIND9's "limiting factors"? And
> what limiting factors are you trying to find?
> 
>     Steven> Its a very busy box (avg 500 lookups / sec) and Im trying
>     Steven> to make it fall over but for whatever reason its limiting
>     Steven> the amount of memory it is using.
> 
> No. The server is using as much RAM as it needs. And as you've set the
> cache size to "unlimited" the upper bound on the amount of memory the
> server could use is what the OS will let it use. That doesn't mean the
> name server will necessarily use that much. Broadly speaking, the
> amount of RAM used by BIND is a function of the number of zones it
> serves, the number of resource records in those zones and the number
> or RRs it caches as a result of lookups. You generally find that the
> RAM/VM footprint of a caching server stabilises after 1-2 weeks. The
> set of names looked up by clients tends to be complete by then.
> 
>     Steven> Please recommend me something I can change to use more of
>     Steven> my RAM and anything else that might increase the
>     Steven> performance & cache size.
> 
> Feeding the server more resource records will increase the cache
> size. Make it load a zone file containing several million RRs. Or load
> millions of zone should. Or make the server look up millions more
> unique names than usual. That should do the trick.
> 
> What is it you're really trying to achieve? It's not at all clear from
> your posting.
>