Bind9(9.3.2p1) "out of memory"

Adam Young adamy at mountaincable.on.ca
Tue Sep 26 15:47:01 UTC 2006


Hi Stefan,

> No idea what BIND does there but i remember there is (was?) a hard limit
> of 3GB RAM
> per user process [1|2] in default x86-32 kernels.
> But as you mentioned you limited max-cache-size to 3GB the question that
> springs to my mind is: Do you really need such a huge working set for
> your cache? (Assuming its a caching-only server.)
> I have been quite lucky with just 380MB on several machines after i used
> two split processes per machine and disabled threading with bind9.
> Do you already monitor your servers query-load [3]?
> I'd say try limiting the max-cache-size to 2 or even 1GB and then look
> at your graphs and see if it has any bad impact on your users.
> 
> [1] http://www.spack.org/wiki/LinuxRamLimits
> [2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115691246628117&w=4
> [3] http://www.campin.net/DNS/graph.html
> 

I haven't tried graphing the query load, but I will do that to determine
exactly what is going on.

It isn't a caching-only nameserver, this does recursive lookups for about
20,000 internet subscribers.  There isn't any significant load-balancing
done between our three nameservers, so that may be a beginning pitfall.

Thanks for all the good suggestions,

-
Adam Young
Systems Support Technologist
Mountain Cablevision Ltd.
(905)667-7436





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