named.conf splitting

[Nick Edwards]

Hi,
In a recent discussion on another list, it was discussed the pros and
cons of splitting the main conf file to a per domain.

In binds case it would be  to /etc/named.d/*.conf
So each zone would have a file in that directory containing only the
relevant info
 eg:

zone "example.com" {
        type master;
        allow-transfer { slavesdns; };
        file "example.com.signed";
        allow-query { any; };
        allow-update { none; };
};

thats it, nothing more, rather than having 2000 entries in named.conf,
we would have 2000 conf file to be read (yes in addition to the 2000
actual zone files.

with apache it takes only 2 or so more seconds to start and reload
doing it this way, so I know that bind will take longer, it has to
with all those  open/read/close files, at present bind starts up in
about 9 seconds due 17K zones, so I'd imagine this would take even up
to 15 seconds.

My question is, has anyone done this with success or failure?
Would a named developer know if its safe or detrimental to do this?
or would it simply make no difference apart from the extra time for
starts/reloads?


(This came about on another list, because we load all hosts  on apache
in one file (2000 per box)  recently something went wrong with sshfs
during a transaction, and in  deleting a vhost block it took out about
100 of them :)  so we are looking at making things a bit more
failsafe, my opinion is, if it can happen once, it can happen again,
it could have happened to a zone file, but luckily only the web conf
file.

Thoughts anyone?

Thanks
Niki