Upper limit to # of zones in a BIND config file

Walter Chick chick at bostonlight.com
Tue Oct 5 03:53:39 UTC 1999


I have a situation where I would like to run BIND 8.2.1 with
a configuration file containing at least one million zone
directives. I saw something on the ISC web site that made
me hopefull that this could be done. Namely, at

 http://www.isc.org/view.cgi?/products/BIND/plans.phtml

it lists BIND version 8.2 enhancements to include "Extensions
to permit over 16 million zones per server".

But in my dual CPU Ultra 60 (w/ 2 GB of RAM) environment I am
seeing results that indicate to me that even one million zones
is impractical if not impossible for BIND to manage. It simply
is taking far too long for BIND to load such a large config
file apparently. Right now I've been waiting on a reload of
the config file that has been going on for over a half hour,
and the log file indicates that I have yet to reach even the
500000 zone mark.

Here is how I am defining the zones in named.conf:
--------------------------------------------------------------
zone "."                    { type hint;   file "named.root"; };
zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" { type master; file "named.127"; };

zone "test1.com"               {type master; file "dns.dev";};
zone "test2.com"               {type master; file "dns.dev";};
		...
  [test3.com through test999999.com appear here]
		...
zone "test1000000.com"               {type master; file "dns.dev";};
--------------------------------------------------------------
Can anyone tell me what the "16 million zones" is referring to?
If this is just a theoretical limit (based on a buffer size lying
about somewhere in the source code perhaps?), does anyone know
what the practical limits to BIND 8.2.1 might be in this area?

Walter Chick
Boston Light Software


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