Need some help with a BIND server

[Barry Margolin]

In article <cbd2m9$2m34$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Jason <jwilliams at courtesymortgage.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone.
> 
> I'm running a pretty simple BIND 9.2 server here for our company and a 
> odd thing has happened here in the past hour. However, as I write this, 
> the problem seems to have been resolved, but I would like to know what 
> is going on.
> 
> Some background info:
> 
> Running on FreeBSD 4.9
> Running as a caching name server, getting info from our ISP's name server.
> 
> What I noticed is that it all of the sudden, it is as if the cache is 
> goen and it is taking a very long time to do queries now. This is not 
> good because it is slowing down email as well as web surfing.

Do you have enough memory?  A common cause of BIND slowness is excessive 
paging when the cache doesn't all fit in RAM.  "ps" or "top" should show 
you how the resident size compares to the process size -- if resident is 
significantly less than process size then named will not perform well.

Another possibility is that it was being bombarded with queries from 
somewhere, and this was overloading it.  Query logging is a way to 
detect this.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***