Need some help with a BIND server

[Jason]

> 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.

Ya, I have over 1gig of Free unused physical RAM. I checked both "ps" 
and "top" and nothing was out of the ordinary.

> 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.

This particular server is just used as a private, internal web server 
for our company. The main purpose is as a caching server as well as 
server up private web servers.

Query logging...something I need to turn on I am assuming?

I was thinking about this more as the day went on, trying to get some 
idea of what went wrong. Could this be some type of configuration 
problem? Maybe something to do with TTL? Since my server is getting 
information from our ISP's DNS server, maybe the cache was cleared out 
on the ISP servers? Just trying to gather ideas here because I want to 
try and prevent this from happening again.

Everything is fine now. Email is being delivered quickly and 
efficiently. Web sites are being displayed as well.

Which brings up something else I thought of. When this was going on, I 
would go to a random web page, and the browser would show in the low 
corner that it was resolving the domain.

Any other suggestions?

I appreciate it.

Jason