Help please: bind 9.3.0

[Chris Stromsoe]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Mark Andrews wrote:

> 	You have datasize (hard limit) and max-cache-size (soft limit)
> 	both set to 20M.  datasize is there to raise the default limit
> 	if it is too low.  max-cache-size is there to restrict the
> 	amount of memory used by the cache.

I have a similar memory usage issue with 9.2.4.  I have max-cache-size set 
to 250M.  After all the zones are loaded, bind uses approximately 500M. 
datasize is not set.  I'm loading ~800 zones.  After a week of running, 
bind swells to ~ 1.5G.  rndc dumpdb gives me a 58M file.

~36 hours after starting, rndc dumpdb gives me a 58M dump file, and ps 
shows:

cbs:~ > ps axu|egrep "^(USER|named)"
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
named    11918  0.0 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17   0:00 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2
named    11919  0.0 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17   0:00 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2
named    11920  5.7 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17  91:46 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2
named    11921  5.7 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17  91:57 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2
named    11922  0.0 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17   0:11 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2
named    11923  0.8 68.0 1070096 702688 ?    S    Jan17  13:05 /usr/local/bind-9.2.4/sbin/named -u named -n 2


options {
         version "x";
         directory "/usr/local/etc/named";

         dump-file "/var/run/named/named_dump.db";
         pid-file "/var/run/named/named.pid";
         statistics-file "/var/run/named/named.stats";

         transfer-format many-answers;
         max-cache-size 250M;
};


How "soft" a soft limit is max-cache-size?  Even allowing for other 
allocations, growth 750M past the max-cache-size doesn't strike me as 
right.  Is there anything that would prevent bind from expiring entries 
from the cache even with max-cache-size set?  The system is running Linux, 
Debian stable, kernel 2.4.  bind was compiled locally.  Any ideas where to 
look?


-Chris