LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au>
  To  : Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 12:32:41 +1030

Re: uh oh! -- BIND's no good again - warning, warning

Mark Newton wrote:
> 
>  > Large is no great problem in general.
>  > But if the old named runs in one process of 2 MBytes at start-up,
>  > and the new one runs in 5 processes of 2 MBytes, then I don't count
>  > this as an improvement. If the software had been written by MS,
>  > people would call this bloatware.
>  > But since linux is without sin....
> 
> Are you sure you're counting correctly?
> 
> named v9 is multithreaded.  Are you sure you're not seeing 5 threads
> sharing the same 2 Mbytes?  I don't think the situation is anywhere
> near as bad as you're making it sound (indeed, it's probably about 20%
> as bad :-)

I have Mark Crispin, one of the ten BIND authors, looking
over my shoulder as I write.  He says that the processes
all share memory.  He also says that BIND9 is like BIND8
in that the database is held in a red-black tree in memory.

This tends to give each page of memory an equal chance of being
referenced, and therefore you need enough memory so that BIND
won't page for adequate performance.

With enough memory BIND9 is slightly slower (about 13%) than
BIND8.  They have plans to fix this.

BIND9 was written from scratch.  It is better written but less
tested than BIND8.  The implication being that BIND9 might
break more at the moment, but the fix cycle will be much faster
than for BIND8 (where getting small problems fixed took months).

glen

-- 
 Glen Turner                                 Network Engineer
 (08) 8303 3936      Australian Academic and Research Network
 glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au          http://www.aarnet.edu.au/
--
 The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised

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