Zone reload time after NOTIFY

[Barry Finkel]

"Scott, Casey" <Casey.Scott at wizards.com> wrote:

> I have a BIND machine configured as a secondary server with 1 zone. The
> zone can receive many DDNS update from Windows clients. The DDNS updates
> occur on the primary server, which is Windows 2003. My question is that
> although the primary DNS server sends NOTIFY's to the BIND server, the
> BIND server takes quite a while before it implements any of the changes.
> I can not find any BIND config option that will effect the
> responsiveness of BIND to NOTIFY's. I don't want to force BIND to reload
> the zone for every NOTIFY, but I would like to have some control over
> the amount of time taken to implement the changes in the zone. 

I looked at the syslog on one of my BIND 9.2.4 servers, which is
slave to many AD zones mastered on a Windows 2003 DNS Server.
The syslog was a little hard to process, as I have most of my 
BIND slave servers configured to NOTIFY other slave servers, so
I can see in the syslog file:

     received notify for zone
     zone ... transferred
     received notify for zone

where the last notify appears minutes after the zone transfer has
occurred.  This is due to one of the slaves being late in its transfer.
In the period from May 21 at 03:35 until May 24 at 08:44
I saw 388 zone transfers, and for each the transfer occured within a
few seconds of receiving the notify packet.  I am seeing no delays.
Most of these AD zones are small, and I do not know what percentage
of the transfers are done via IXFR.  I do have one forward zone and
five reverse zones on the Windows DNS Server (under the control of
a MS Windows DHCP server); these zones are somewhat large (the forward
zone has 620 entries).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994