BIND pauses on loading large zones

[Vinny Abello]

At 05:10 PM 6/18/2004, you wrote:
>At 08:02 PM 6/15/2004, Vinny Abello wrote:
>>Hello all,
>>
>>I've heard of this issue before and remember a discussion but no resolution.
>>
>>I have a zone that is approximately 35MB in size.
>
>I assume that you are talking about RBL.

Yup.

>>  When I add it to the
>>named.conf file and do an rndc reconfig, the server stops answering queries
>>for probably around 10 seconds or more while it's loading that zone. Also,
>>if I modify it and do an rndc reload zonename the same thing happens.
>>
>>I heard that this is because there is only one worker thread by default if
>>BIND can't detect more than one CPU. I have 4 CPU's in a system
>>(technically 2 with hyperthreading) and it doesn't appear to detect them.
>
>You can look in the event viewer to find out how many it thinks it has. 
>It's the
>second message right after it gives the BIND version number.

OK, I'll have to check that out.

>>  I
>>haven't tried running it in the foreground to see how many CPU's... but I
>>did try changing the startup option to include -n 4 and also tried -n4 as
>>well but it didn't make a difference, and the OS didn't indicate any more
>>threads were created than without that setting.
>
>Where are you doing that? Did you add that in the Registry to the Service
>as part of the program name? Currenlty that's the only way to do it.

Yes.

>>This is on Windows Server 2003 with BIND 9.2.4rc4.
>
>I haven't run W2K3.

You should! :) Well, if you're a Windows shop it's well worth it.

>>Any takers? :)
>
>Danny


Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
vinny at tellurian.com
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