BIND 9.2.3 and zone transfers larger than 64MB

[Vinny Abello]

I've encountered out of memory errors on FreeBSD 4.10 also right at 512MB. 
It's something in the OS that needs to be adjusted. If you know how or 
anyone else does offhand (or a link that tells you) I'd appreciate it as 
well. I'm still learning a lot about FreeBSD and have this problem with a 
memory hogging app, but I currently don't run it so I sort of forgot about 
this. :) I know this isn't a FreeBSD list so feel free to reply off list if 
someone has the info on how to change it. Thanks!

At 11:23 AM 8/27/2004, Mark Hennessy wrote:
>Thanks for responding.  It looks like named has hit a memory use ceiling =
>on
>my machine at around 512MB.  It looks like the FreeBSD 4.10 kernel on =
>this
>machine may have a default per-process limit of 512MB.
>
>--
>  Mark Hennessy
>=20
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jim Reid [mailto:jim at rfc1035.com]=20
>Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 11:15 AM
>To: Mark Hennessy
>Cc: bind-users at isc.org
>Subject: Re: BIND 9.2.3 and zone transfers larger than 64MB=20
>
> >>>>> "Mark" =3D=3D Mark Hennessy <mhennessy at cloud9.net> writes:
>
>
>     Mark> When the process dies, I get the following: Aug 27 09:30:47
>     Mark> <host> /kernel: pid 83125 (named), uid 0: exited on =3D signal
>     Mark> 11 (core dumped)
>
>Signal 11 is a segmentation violation. This usually means the process
>has tried to access something outside its address space or dereferenced
>a NULL pointer. The most likely scenario for that is the name server is
>asking the OS for more RAM/VM and the OS is saying no.
>
>     Mark> This problem has not happened before this particular zone
>     Mark> file started =3D to get around 64MB and larger.  It does not
>     Mark> look like a memory problem with the server, it has over 1 GB
>     Mark> of RAM to play with.
>
>You're focusing on the amount of RAM, which is wrong. You should be
>concentrating on the amount of RAM and VM that the OS is allowing the
>name server to use. These are different things. Just because you have
>1 GB of RAM doesn't mean the name server gets to use all or even most
>of that.
>
>     Mark> Why would I be given advice to move back to BIND 8 from
>     Mark> others who have =3D seen the problem go away by going back to
>     Mark> BIND 8?  Simply saying that the =3D machine does not have
>     Mark> sufficient memory doesn't make any sense.
>
>It makes perfect sense. The name server is even logging the fact it's
>out of memory. You seem to be confusing the physical RAM in the box
>with the RAM/VM that the OS will let the name server use. Compare the
>size of the name server process with the OS-enforced resource limits.
>ISTR some BSD-based systems have an abitrary default limit of 64Mb of
>data space for a process. This is nowhere near enough for a
>non-trivial name server. Your name server may well be inheriting these
>defaults.
>
>BTW, BIND9 can use twice as much RAM/VM as BIND8 when it loads a zone.
>This may be significant when the zone that's loaded is large. The
>reason for this is BIND9 creates a new data structure when it reloads
>a zone. Once the zone load completes, the red-black tree for the old
>copy of the zone is discarded. So there's a transient interval when
>BIND9 has two copies of the zone in memory at once. BIND8 uses a
>different technique for reloading zones. It loads the new copy over
>the top of the existing zone which is evil, though it saves RAM/VM.


Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
vinny at tellurian.com
(973)300-9211 x 125
(973)940-6125 (Direct)
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