BIND 9 Memory Leak?

[Bill Larson]

On Jan 24, 2007, at 2:23 PM, Greg Burch wrote:

> Stephen, thanks for your response.  Our servers are serving as caching
> name servers and also serving up internal-only zones.  We have
> thousands of clients querying each name server.
>
> You're correct in that we compiled the versions of BIND ourselves, but
> we did not tweak any compiler options from the default.
>
> I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're driving at with the  
> "look
> for data that doesn't match your server" suggestion...there definitely
> will be cached Internet data there.  The issue I had was that the zone
> files and cache dump added up to 7.7M at that moment in time, yet the
> named process is using 391M of memory.  That's a very large
> discrepancy.

Have you considered that if you have "thousands of clients querying  
each name server", maybe you should be running a server where 391MB  
of memory isn't so great of a concern.  If your servers are only  
providing DNS services, then these servers could be operating with  
512MB of RAM.  Increase the amount of RAM and you won't be worrying  
about the process size.

Are you running anything else, besides "named", on the servers?  A  
generally accepted suggestion is to run only your DNS services on  
your servers and not run mail, web, etc., servers on the same hardware.

> Since we've begun doing a nightly restart of the named process, we  
> have
> not experienced the swapping issues, so it definitely looks like a
> memory leak of some kind from where I'm sitting.

Memory is cheap.  This would be the best solution to your problem.

Bill Larson