bind9 is taking little Breaks for Some Reason.

[Martin McCormick]

Chris Thompson writes:
> [... enormous journal files may be causing BIND performance problems  ...]
> 

> You do realise you can keep the journal files trimmed by using
> max-journal-size (in options, or in each zone statement)? That's
> assuming you are at BIND 9.3 or later. There's very little point
> in keeping more than enough to provide IXFR to slaves (or whatever
> BIND itself needs for updates not committed to the zone file, but
> BIND doesn't let max-journal-size cause it to lose _them_).

	I actually had missed the max-journal-size directive and
we had never had a problem before because the journals had always
gotten reset each time we upgraded bind or had to stop and
restart it for some reason and they never had a chance to grow
as large as they did over the last 18 or so months. It was more
or less the perfect storm of inattention plus no particular
reason to stop bind and remove them.

	My thanks to Chris Thompson for alerting me to the
max-journal-size directive. I have already put it in our
configurations to keep this from happening again. I suspect the
trouble this causes may vary from platform to platform and also
may vary between different flavors of UNIX such as FreeBSD,
Linux, etc because it will depend upon what starts to wimp out
in that OS when faced with gigantic files that need to be
updated quickly.

Martin McCormick