Hello. I've been running our netbsd successfully as a platform for our
name server for about two years now; however, we've come across a rather
perplexing problem over the last few months. As our name service has grown
substantially over the last year (about 120 domains now), the amount of
memory required by named has also grown substantially, as you can probably
imagine. The machine itself is a minimal configuration, and is dedicated
just for DNS (no X, no fun stuff...).

The problem is that there seems to be a malloc ceiling of 16M, after which
named complains that it can't malloc any more memory and crashes.
Originally we had 20M of memory, and thought that the machine wasn't
swapping, so we built some test programs that would malloc memory beyond
the amount of available RAM to see what would happen. As it turned out,
the machine was swapping, but the test programs were also unable to malloc
once they approached 16M.

So then we added another 16M (we needed this anyway), but still processes
are unable to acquire more than 16M of memory. I was unable to find any
kernel options relating to this, or any other explanation for the problem.
So, I'm hoping that someone else might have an easy explanation for this
that I have just overlooked.

The configuration is as follows:

	ALR Business VEISA 486DX-33
	36M RAM
	200MB IDE disk
	40M swap
	NetBSD 1.1
	BIND 4.93-REL

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance..
____________________________________________________________________________
Mike Bradford
Network Services
Dept. of Computing Services
University of Arkansas