Bind 9.2.3 very, very slow starup

[Danny Mayer]

At 09:37 PM 7/12/2004, Eric Dynowski wrote:
>Hello,
>
>We are having a major problem with our bind 9 server. When restarting our
>server it can take hours for it to load all the zones
>and start answering queries. We have discovered that killing the named
>processes, and restarting it will eventually result in a fast
>load of all zones (less then 1 second). However, sometimes we only need to
>kill and restart 2 or 3 times, while 40 or 500 times other times.

Why exactly are you restarting? Does rndc reload and rndc reconfig not work
for you?

Danny

>When restarting the slowness begins at random points during the load for
>each restart, sometimes after only loading one or two zones,
>other times after loading 50 zones..
>
>The only common thread we could discover is that if we restart the server
>late at night.. 12am, 1am, the restart is almost always successful
>the first time. This led us to think it was related to network traffic, so
>we tried shutting down the network interface and restarting bind, but the
>load was still slow.
>Rebooting the machine does nothing.
>
>I was beginning to think it could be related to zone data, so today we
>also tried removing all the zones but one, with still no luck.
>
>The server is master for about 35 zones, and slave for about 65 zones with
>a total of about 14,000 records, running on a Compaq Proliant
>DL380 733Mhz with 384MB of RAM under Debian 3.0, kernel 2.4.18.
>
>I have tried different kernels up to 2.6, I have recompiled bind with and
>with out thread support, run it with debugging, etc, and cannot
>find any cause for the hang up. Given a restart that is slow, after
>several hours of zone loading, named will eventually begin answering
>queries and responding normally.
>
>Please help!
>
>Thanks
>
>Eric Dynowski