how much ram is needed?????

[Kevin Darcy]

Iñaki Martínez Díez wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I have a bind 9.4.1 server in Debian Etch with more than 24.000 zones.
>   
How many records?
>  The server has 2 Gb of RAM but i think is not enough.
>   
What makes you think that? On my Solaris 9 boxes, with 4Gb, hosting 
about 5100 zones containing about 52,000 records, but which are also 
performing recursive Internet DNS resolution (in a separate view of 
course) for web/mail connectivity, etc., the "sar -r" command tells me 
my freemem is stable and I'm basically not swapping at all. I'm not 
familiar with the tools available on Debian, or how one would go about 
interpreting their results, but there _must_ be a way to tell whether 
you're in trouble memory-wise.  Perhaps you should ask on a Debian list.
>  The zones are growing day by day.
>
>  How much ram is needed for about 24.000 zones????
>
>  Is there any formula to calculate this????
>
>   
In the days of BIND 8 I think some folks used a rule-of-thumb of 100 
bytes/record. Don't know if that's valid any more for BIND 9.

For us, it works out better economically to just buy "comfortably large" 
boxes at every lease-refresh cycle, allowing for some growth. Trying to 
micromanage our hardware resources, and to do incremental upgrades in 
any reasonable timeframe (given our byzantine procurement processes) 
just doesn't make sense for us. Your mileage may vary.

                                                                         
                                    - Kevin