ndc stats problem on busy DNS servers

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Alexis" == Alexis Oosterhoff <alexis at bt.net> writes:

    Alexis> I have 9 servers which are dumping their stats to
    Alexis> named.stats on an hourly basis, using a call to "ndc
    Alexis> stats". Most of the machines are dumping the stats
    Alexis> reliably, however, on two of our busier caching servers
    Alexis> (approx. 400 lookups/sec), "ndc stats" works some times
    Alexis> and not others.

    Alexis> The error message being displayed when the "ndc stats"
    Alexis> call fails is:

    Alexis>     cannot open stat file, "named.stats"

    Alexis> The "named.stats" file is created, owned by user "nobody"
    Alexis> but with null file size.

Weird. The name server *appends* to the stats file, so it shouldn't be
an empty file. Could it be an OS problem, like running out of disk
space on the filesystem? Or maybe the stats file gets so big it
exceeds some OS limit on the maximum file size? It's a pity the error
message doesn't print the reason why fopen() fails. Sigh.

What happens if you rename the existing stats file before generating a
new one?