Bind is hanging on CentOS 4.4

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉]

At Tue, 19 May 2009 12:55:08 -0400,
"Jesse Cabral" <jcabral at mtsolutions.net> wrote:

> I have been having an issue with Bind hanging for several months. I am
> currently running BIND 9.5.1-P2 on CentOS 4.4 kernel 2.6.9-42.0.3Elsmp as
> mail server using MailScanner, Postfix, spamassassin-clamav, openwebmail,
> pop-before-smtp.
> Binds was hanging with 9.2.4 as well so I upgraded to the current version
> above.
> It hangs at different times and intervals. The only thing I find in the
> messages log is the last entry for named before the hang. Does not appear to
> be a memory or resource issue from my review of the system. The only way to
> get named running is to kill the pid using kill -9 (pidid) . When named
> hangs smtp service fails as it needs named to run properly.
> I am wondering if a kernel update is order for BIND to function properly.
> Any suggestions to narrow down the root cause ?

Since you said you had to kill the process, it didn't crash, right?
Did you enable threads?  If so, does that change if you disable it?
One common reason of this type of 'hang' is an inter-thread dead
lock.  If that is the case, disabling threads will help, as long as
you can accept the possibly decreased performance by doing so.

---
JINMEI, Tatuya
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.