Memory used by caching name server?

[Rob]

Olaf Hoyer wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Rob wrote:
> 
> 
>>>named claims memory on the fly.
>>>On Solaris, I have bind 8 seen claiming about 800MB RAM for its caching
>>>database, being the resolver for the machine that creates from http-logs
>>>colorful pictures and other fancy things...
>>
>>Waaauw, that sounds rather dangerous to me. I have a caching nameserver
>>running on an old Pentium-I with 32 Mb of ram (48 Mb swap). I am still
>>using it in a testing enviroment, moderately using the named's cache.
>>So far total memory usage by the OS is very low (swap is hardly used).
>>
>>I wonder if named would eat up all the ram in a production enviroment.
>>Can't imagine that, actually. Nowhere I have seen warnings against
>>such disaster. But then there is this option for the named configuration
>>file, that limits the cache memory usage.....
>>
> 
> Well, some colleagues have some Machines with 512MB RAM running, also
> bind 9, but with no given limit on size. They serve as resolvers to
> several thousands of dedicated servers (customers servers) and use more
> than 200MB RAM without being limited.
> 
> The example on Solaris is in a scenarion where a dedicated host has to
> chew more than 30 GB http logs a day, does reverse lookups and then does
> some statistics on them, so the named has to look up pretty much domain
> names...
> 
> This special host has more than 10 CPU in it, so you can imagine the
> power needed...
> 
> On other hosts, where I also run named as caching resolver, I have about
> 3-4 MB memory footprint for normal use...

How do you actually figure out how much memory is consumed by named?
I still have no idea how to do that, so I have no idea how much
my poor old Pentium-I is suffering from the named cache....
Knowing how to do that, would help me already a little further.

Regards,
Rob.