single-machine load balancing

[Barry Margolin]

In article <8cfk91$v6c$1 at nnrp1.deja.com>,  <sschmidt at my-deja.com> wrote:
>Strange question:  Does anyone have any experience running multiple
>instances of named (bind 8.2.2-P3 is what I'm using) on a single SMP
>machine?  I'm running into a bottleneck on one processor right now, as
>the named process doesn't spawn clients for each query (reasonable).
>Rather than assign additional machines to the task, I'd rather just run
>multiple instances of named bound to different ports on the same
>interface, thus utilizing the spare processor cycles I have on the
>other processors in the box.

Named is rarely CPU-bound.  If it's having performance problems, it's
almost always due to excessive paging, due to the cache growing larger than
physical RAM.  Using multiple processors is not likely to solve this; in
fact, it will make it worse, since the two processes will be competing
against each other for RAM.

Try adding more RAM, not processors.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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