[PLUG] bind9 on low-spec machine?

drew wymore drew.wymore at gmail.com
Sat Mar 3 22:21:38 UTC 2007


On 3/3/07, Eric Wilhelm <scratchcomputing at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been happily running bind for local nameservices+caching on a
> 300MHz k7 with 256MB ram for a couple of years now.  Recently, I've
> been migrating that machine's (fileserver, etc) services to a much
> faster box, but I decided to try DNS on a much lower-powered box (which
> is a failover webserver, etc and rarely gets shutdown.)  The box in
> question is a pentium 133MHz with 128MB ram.  Both machines are running
> sarge.
>
> Now dns queries are extremely slow.  It looks like the box isn't
> swapping, but I haven't got the first clue about diagnosing a bind
> performance issue.  Is it cpu bound?  Something just plain weird with
> this old machine?  The other odd thing is that if I turn off the local
> nameservices (and use just caching), the speed comes back.  Do I just
> have a braindead dns setup (and the faster machine is able to gloss
> over my idiocy?)  Note that I don't claim to know what I'm doing since
> RTFM'ing doesn't seem to be doing me any good here.
>
> Any suggestions?  Should I be looking for a different server daemon?
> What are the embedded linux routers and such running for dns?
>
> --Eric
> --
> hobgoblin n 1: (folklore) a small grotesque supernatural creature that
>           makes trouble for human beings
> ---------------------------------------------------

Eric-
You can set the debug level to 255 which will log EVERYTHING but might be
useful in telling you whats wrong. You can play with the debug levels to get
what you want. When the machine is running slow do you see an increase in
load on the box? What version are you running? How many zones are you
loading? Bind loads the config data and zones into memory at startup so if
you're loading a bunch of zones @ 128 MB of RAM it would make sense that it
speeds back up when you go to a caching only setup.

Drew-



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