rndc reconfig causing long timeouts

[Kevin Darcy]

Tavis Gustafson wrote:

>Hello. We are using bind 9.2.3 on linux kernel 2.4.24 . 
>Our main zone file is 16MB.  We are experiencing 30 second lookup 
>timeouts every time we execute an rndc reconfig.  We do this only when 
>updating new or removed zones (sometimes doing it every few minutes).  
>Is this beahaviour on par with others' like installations? And is there 
>another way to tell bind about new zones besides the reconfig? 
>When running rndc reconfig, named uses 35% of our system's main memory.  
>During the timeouts named pegs the processor at 99% while disk activity 
>remains relatively calm. 
>
My understanding is that rndc reconfig *only* looks at and (re-)parses 
the named.conf file, so the size of your zone file is irrelevant, and it 
would explain why you're not seeing any significant disk I/O. More 
important than the size of a zone or all zones would be _how_many_ zones 
you have, and perhaps how complex those zones are (e.g. lots of 
zone-level access restrictions, etc.). If you're doing reconfigs every 
few minutes sometimes, I would expect that you have a *lot* of zones. 
Maybe you should split those among multiple machines.

                                                                         
                                                - Kevin