We run BIND 9.5.0-P1 on an Alpha Tru64-4.0G box. Yesterday morning our named suddenly stopped serving requests, although the daemon had not died; the log file showed two entries for every request:
Aug 11 04:01:14 pangea named[10832]: resolver.c:3239: unexpected error: Aug 11 04:01:14 pangea named[10832]: isc_timer_create: out of memory There were tens of thousands of these. Dig shows that named is returning status SERVFAIL for every request. Top shows that named is using a huge amount of memory: resident set size over 700MB. I tried to fix this by setting max-cache-size to 32M in the options section of our named.conf and restarting named, but that doesn't seem to have helped -- in 24 hours, named's memory usage has risen to 400M and is still climbing. Is there a way to fix this problem, or at least control named's behavior? Another possibly-related observation: At this point, with named having run for a day and using 400M of memory, I decided to take a look at the cache to see if it was growing wildly, so I ran "rndc dumpdb".This saved a cache_dump.db file of about 5M, which I guess is reasonable, but it also caused named to dump core and die. The core file is incomplete because there wasn't enough room in /etc to save it all. The log file didn't record any error when named crashed; the last entry is just "dumpdb complete". After restarting named, I tried "rndc dumpdb" again. This time it worked fine, saving a 700K cache file; no crash, no core dump. The dumpdb crash worries me, but we really need to fix the out of memory problem. Any suggestions? -- Kai Lanz