named and high CPU utilization

[Radu "Ux" D.]

Hi


The named (not very high loaded one) goes taking 100% CPU and can't be 
stopped in an usual fashion. The same named configuration, on other 
machine, doesn't behaves like this. It seems that this is only occurring 
on Windows systems with dual cpu’s. I did find a forum online for a 
software called Plesk that uses named.exe that has the same issue and 
the fix that they applied was to assign cpu affinity to named.exe in the 
code. Windows will allow you to assign cpu affinity through task manager 
but it won’t allow you to assign affinity to a service! The following is 
taken from the Plesk forum:

"Bind is configured to work on 1 CPU and it makes it do not waste CPU 
resources."

Also I pulled the following from the Oreilly windows 2000 performance guide:

"It should not be a big surprise to learn that one secondary effect of 
multiprocessor coordination and serialization is that it makes caching 
less effective. This, in turn, reduces the processor's instruction 
execution rate. To understand why SMPs impact cache effectiveness, we 
soon take a detour into the realm of cache coherence. From a 
configuration and tuning perspective, one intended effect of setting up 
an application to run with processor affinity is to improve cache 
effectiveness and increase the instruction execution rate. Direct 
measurements of both instruction execution rate and caching efficiency, 
fortunately, are available via the Pentium counters."

Anyone encountered something like this? Any idea?

-- 
Thx

Radu "Ux" D.