dnsperf and BIND memory consumption

[Vinny Abello]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉 [mailto:Jinmei_Tatuya at isc.org]
> Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 12:38 AM
> To: Vinny Abello
> Cc: bind-users at isc.org
> Subject: Re: dnsperf and BIND memory consumption
>
> At Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:26:04 -0400,
> Vinny Abello <vinny at tellurian.com> wrote:
>
> > Huh... maybe I was right in the first place. I left dnsperf running
> > and named ran out of memory. In my syslog I had a lot of these
> > swap_pager_getswapspace failed messages followed by named finally
> > dying (again, FreeBSD 7.0 STABLE AMD64, 4GB of RAM and the only
> > software running is really BIND).
>
> Quick questions: did you enable threads?  If so, does that change if
> you disable threads?  We've heard a similar report on a beta version
> of 9.5.0 for FreeBSD, which reportedly only happened with enabling
> threads (and only happened with 9.5, not 9.4).  I've tried to
> reproduce it with a mostly equivalent setting of OS/hardware, but
> never succeeded in seeing it by myself.

Just an update on some additional data I have on this. I saw your previous thread on this issue where you ran without SMP compiled into the kernel and could not reproduce the problem. Just to be sure and eliminate that, I recompiled my kernel without SMP support, but I still saw the leak with threads compiled into BIND.

I instead tried switching to BIND 9.4.2-P2 instead of BIND 9.5.0-P2 with threads enabled and I am have no memory leak problems at all with 9.4.2-P2. For now I am going to stick with this as everything seems to be working perfectly. I wanted to try and get you more information on the BIND 9.5.0-P2 memory consumption, but I don't have enough experience in getting the data you wanted. I'm fairly confident if you setup a FreeBSD 7.0 AMD64 system and install the BIND 9.5.0-P2 port, you'll see the same problem. That's practically all that I did to see the problem. The server does nothing else and was just recently built for this purpose. If you have more information on how to get the data you were looking for, I can try it on another server for you. Alternately I could probably even give you shell access to a machine on which I can create this problem. Let me know. I'd be happy to help.

-Vinny