From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Description of problem: There seems to be a memory leak problem with Bind/Named ver 9.1.0 under RedHat 7.1. My pc is a p3 500 with 96 megs of ram. Named is running as a DNS caching server on my gateway for the local lan. It has two 10/100 mbit network cards 1 connected to oputs@home and the other the local lan. After a fresh boot my gateway uses upto 34-36 megs of RAM, after named has been running for awhile all 96 megs is being used and so is part of the 128 meg swap... (but only upto 3 megs of the swap if that.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.run named as a DNS caching server. 2.use it for > 12 hours 3.top and look at RAM usage :P~ Actual Results: RAM is totaly used up unnecessarly, top only says that named is using upto 20 megs or so, but another 40 - 60 megs goes missing somewhere. Additional info: Even if i kill or stop named and reload all the RAM still doesnt come back, have to reboot to get RAM back.
Instead of misinterpreting the output of "top", better have a look at the second output line of "free", or run "xosview", and observe how much of your otherwise unused RAM is used for buffers and cache *temporarily*. And that swap space is used although the system is not short on memory has been the nature of the 2.4 kernels so far.
I agree with mschwendt's comment - chances are you are misinterpreting the numbers, especially considering that named passed all our tests and the named running on bero.org (primary for 93 domains, secondary for 16 others) is using up just 4 MB RAM after 214 days of uptime.