9.5.0-P1: out of memory error - SERVFAIL

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉]

At Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:36:26 -0700,
Kai Lanz <lanz at stanford.edu> wrote:

> We run BIND 9.5.0-P1 on an Alpha Tru64-4.0G box. Yesterday morning
> our named suddenly stopped serving requests, although the daemon
> had not died; the log file showed two entries for every request:
> 
> Aug 11 04:01:14 pangea named[10832]: resolver.c:3239: unexpected error:
> Aug 11 04:01:14 pangea named[10832]: isc_timer_create: out of memory
> 
> There were tens of thousands of these. Dig shows that named is returning
> status SERVFAIL for every request. Top shows that named is using a huge
> amount of memory: resident set size over 700MB.

I've heard a similar problem with FreeBSD/AMD64, but this is my first
time to hear it for Tru64/Alpha.  This could be memory leak in BIND9,
but other evidences do not really indicate such a trivial bug.

Unfortunately, we have currently no idea about how this could ever
happen.  Some heuristic workaround that may or may not help are:

- disable threads
- use 9.4 instead of 9.5 if you don't have a strong reason for using 9.5

---
JINMEI, Tatuya
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.