Lots and Lots of Domains = ?? RAM

[Barry Margolin]

In article <fc.000f4850005dab11000f4850005dab11.5dab43 at newc.com>,
cd-BIND-list <cd-BIND-list at newc.com> wrote:
>I'm interested in hosting over 20,000 domains on a single redhat server, most
>of which will use the same physical zone file for the name server information.
>
>What kind of ram requirements would you imagine would be necessary to make
>this happen? Are there any concerns I should have, especially with my
>secondaries?

It depends on how big the zones are.

We have about 34,000 domains on our servers, and they range from lots of
tiny zones (sometimes nothing other than the SOA and NS records, and
frequently just a www record and an MX record) to a few enormous ones
(>10,000 records).  On a SPARC workstation the data size of the processes
is about 250MB, so I think we have 512MB RAM.  I don't think the amount of
memory that named uses is too dependent on the hardware or OS, so it would
probably be similar on Linux.

In our configuration we have a hidden master server for domains we host, a
stealth slave server for domains that customers host, and registered slave
servers that transfer from either the hidden master or stealth slave.  One
problem we've noticed is that the registered slaves sometimes get several
hours behind in their zone refreshes.  We're not sure why this happens, but
we're planning on hiring Nominom (the commercial spin-off from ISC) to
resolve it.

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