Urgent: Mad Bind

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Birgit" == Birgit Schmid <Birgit.Schmid at ecrc.de> writes:

    Birgit> my bind starts to "consume" a little bit too much:

    Birgit> CPU states: 0.0% idle, 89.0% user, 10.8% kernel, 0.2% iowait, 0.0% swap
    Birgit> Memory: 512M real, 8112K free, 58M swap in use, 2387M swap free

    Birgit>  PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE   TIME    CPU COMMAND
    Birgit>  906 root       1   0    0   49M   39M run    50:35 98.23% named

What version of the OS and BIND are you running?

It might also be an idea to use a system call tracer like truss or
ktrace to find out what the process is doing. The info you've given
suggests that the name server is executing in user mode and not making
many system calls which is odd. And system call tracing might not show
anything.  lsof would be useful to find out what file descriptors the
process had open.

Could it be that you've just caught the name server while it was in
the middle of cleaning up its cache? That could account for a lot of
user-mode CPU activity for a few seconds every hour or so.