>BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual</
TH> Resource Requirements</
A>Hardware requirements</
A>Nameserver Intensive Environment Issues</
A>Supported Operating Systems</
A>2.1. Hardware requirements</
A> hardware requirements have traditionally been quite modest.
For many installations, servers that have been pensioned off from
active duty have performed admirably as <
SPAN>The DNSSEC and IPv6 features of <
SPAN> 9 may prove to be quite
CPU intensive however, so organizations that make heavy use of these
features may wish to consider larger systems for these applications.
> 9 is now fully multithreaded, allowing full utilization of
multiprocessor systems for installations that need it.</
P>2.2. CPU Requirements</
A>CPU requirements for <
SPAN> 9 range from i486-class machines
for serving of static zones without caching, to enterprise-class
machines if you intend to process many dynamic updates and DNSSEC
signed zones, serving many thousands of queries per second.</
P>2.3. Memory Requirements</
A>The memory of the server has to be large enough to fit the
cache and zones loaded off disk. The <
Boption can be used to limit the amount of memory used by the cache,
at the expense of reducing cache hit rates and causing more <
SPANtraffic. It is still good practice to have enough memory to load
all zone and cache data into memory — unfortunately, the best way
to determine this for a given installation is to watch the nameserver
in operation. After a few weeks the server process should reach
a relatively stable size where entries are expiring from the cache as
fast as they are being inserted. Ideally, the resource limits should
be set higher than this stable size.</
P>2.4. Nameserver Intensive Environment Issues</
A>For nameserver intensive environments, there are two alternative
configurations that may be used. The first is where clients and
any second-level internal nameservers query a main nameserver, which
has enough memory to build a large cache. This approach minimizes
the bandwidth used by external name lookups. The second alternative
is to set up second-level internal nameservers to make queries independently.
In this configuration, none of the individual machines needs to
have as much memory or CPU power as in the first alternative, but
this has the disadvantage of making many more external queries,
as none of the nameservers share their cached data.</
P>2.5. Supported Operating Systems</
A> 9 compiles and runs on the following operating
>Sun Solaris 2.6, 7, 8</
P>NetBSD 1.5 (with unproven-pthreads 0.17)</
P>FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE, 3.5, 4.0, 4.1</
P>Red Hat Linux 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0</
P>Nameserver Configuration</
TD