cleaning-interval question

Walkenhorst, Benjamin Benjamin.Walkenhorst at telekom.de
Tue Oct 5 06:52:26 UTC 2004


Hello everyone,

In what respect is BIND's behaviour affected by the value of 'cleaning-interval'?
BIND will look through its cache every <cleaning-interval> minutes (default: 60) for expired entries and, if it finds any, removes them, that much I could find out in the manual.

But what happens when an already expired entry is requested again, before being removed from cache? Will the server remove it just then (and probably re-query the RR)? This seems like the only sane behaviour I could come up with for this situation, so ... could someone confirm to me BIND does behave like this? (The alternative looks like passing expired RRs to resolvers which just seems silly).

In what respect will modifying this value change the behaviour of the system? Will it just make BIND free up (de facto unused) memory faster (or slower, depending on how I change the value) or are there other effects to be expected?
If I am not entirely mistaken, the machines BIND runs on have... sufficient memory at least, so just _saving_ some won't be a big deal. On the other hand, we have to use BIND 9.1.1 right now which apparently doesn't implement a 'max-cache-size' option. So with that unavailable, could I use the 'cleaning-interval' for controlling - or at least influencing - the memory usage of BIND?
Would setting this value too low (say, 1) adversely influence BIND's performance? (Like if it has a big cache, it might have to go all over it again and again...)

Thank you very much,
Benjamin Walkenhorst


More information about the bind-users mailing list