[Re: [lug] Memory problem]

Justin glowecon at netscape.net
Tue Nov 28 16:23:54 MST 2000


On this particular machine I just run a caching nameserver so there are no
zones or anything that it is authorative for. I have another seperate box that
does all the dns requests and another box that is the secondary. I think the
BIND service on this particular box rarely if ever gets used. But since you
mentioned those BIND directives I may use them on my other BIND servers  :)  I
didn't know about them, hehe.

Justin

Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> This is farily normal in my experience with big BIND servers.
> 
> BIND will use up all the physical RAM available unless you limit
> it's cache size.  It doesn't seem to hurt anything.
> 
> As long as swap isn't filling up, you're fine.  The kernel will play
> traffic cop and swap out unused BIND information when you run other
> apps.  If you're worried about the performance of those apps or you're
> seeing a lot of paging,  you can limit BIND's use of RAM with the 
> "datasize" and "stacksize" directives in the "options" section.
> 
> (plug) Evi's book has a nice discussion of RAM/resource utilization that
> talks about how to look at this stuff.  I had similar concerns until I
> dumped some stats and graphed them.  My machines weren't paging too bad,
> and some of them are dedicated nameservers anyway, so I gave BIND the
> "datasize unlimited" and "stacksize unlimited" directives to make sure
> BIND wouldn't limit itself on what it asked the kernel for... and I let
> the kernel make all the RAM utilization decisions.  
> 
> Another interesting thing I've seen is that somehow BIND appears to be
> written (not being a C coder -- I don't know how) to avoid swap.  The
> machines only seem to swap when other apps besides BIND run.
> 
> Hopefully that's helpful.
> 
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 12:12:29PM -0700, Justin wrote:
> > I'm running into a memory issue on my main server machine. I have never
had
> > this problem before and it seemed to start within the last 2 weeks. Using
> > procinfo I am seeing the memory usage gradually increasing until it
reaches
> > the max of 128megs. Last week I started killing off process's randomly to
see
> > if that free'd memory but no luck. I tried restarting all my main server
apps
> > including apache, postfix, identd, syslog, inetd, and some others. The
memory
> > usage still showed the same, but when doing a ps aux none of the
process's
> > seemed to be hogging any memory. I ended up shutting down and booting back
up
> > to clear the memory problem. After the reboot the mem usage, according to
> > procinfo, was about 50megs. After my users had started up all their stuff
> > again the memory was up to about 90megs, which is normal. I ran my
> > counterstrike server for a while saturday night, which consumes about
28megs,
> > then shut it down later on. The memory dropped back down to around 90megs
> > after that but has been increasing daily for no particular reason. It's
now at
> > about 122megs of the max 128, and the only thing I've done since the
weekend
> > was update my BIND to P7. Any way to trouble shoot this or any ideas of
what
> > might be going on? The box is Redhat 6.1 (updated) w/ kernel 2.2.15.
Thanks in
> > advance for any help.
> > 
> > Justin
> 
> -- 
> Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>
> 
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> 
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