BIND 9.2.3 and zone transfers larger than 64MB

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Hennessy <mhennessy at cloud9.net> writes:

    Mark> I get the following output in my logs:

    Mark> Aug 27 08:45:17 <host> named[83125]: transfer of =
    Mark> 'rbl-plus.mail-abuse.org/IN' from <mail-abuse.IP>#53: failed
    Mark> while receiving responses: out of memory

    Mark> My named process also dies every few hours or so.

What gets printed in the logs?

    Mark> Is there any recommended course of action to take to fix
    Mark> this that does = not involve going back to BIND 8?

Your name server is clearly running out of memory. Perhaps you have
artificially low resource limits on the amount of RAM/VM that named
can use? Aside from throwing more memory at the name server, you might
want to look at why it's running out. Perhaps there is some other
problem like a memory leak in the OS or your name server is serving
too many (large) zones for the resources it's been allocated? What are
the OS-imposed limits? How much RAM/VM does the box have? What other
processes are guzzling RAM and VM resources? Do you have any resource
limits imposed in the named.conf file?

The size of the zone transfer has nothing to do with the problem.
Loading a 64Mb zone file shouldn't be an issue either. BIND9 regularly
loads zones bigger than 1 Gb. However loading this 64Mb file could be
a problem if the OS won't let the name server use that much extra RAM
or VM. Which is what seems to be the case here.