dns lookup timing cycling up and down

[rsesnaski at yahoo.com]

I've got a RHEL4 ES Update1 host running bind 9.2.4. My DNS lookup
times seem to be cycling up and down. Everything is fine for awhile
and then everything slows down and I start getting timeouts. I'm not
asking for the solution but does anyone know what areas to start
looking in or how to turn on some logging where I can get lookup
times. I'm no bind guru and this thing is driving me nuts.

I'm running it in a chroot'ed /var/named/chroot/var/named directory,
how
easy is this to turn off, just copy the files up to /var/named and turn
off the chroot option in /etc/sysconfig/named. I think running it in a
chroot environment doesn't allow me to hook to it with an strace -p.

Ron