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Summary

When serve-stale is enabled, named can be forced into a bad state in which:

• the performance of the server drops dramatically
• it leaks resolver client tasks
• it uses large amounts of CPU even when not serving real clients
• it writes a huge volume of 'stale answer' log messages

In my testing this bad state starts after about an hour.

This was originally reported in #185 (closed) but this problem seems to be separate from the crash so I am opening a new issue.

Steps to reproduce

I run three copies of the following command-line

$ while sleep $(( RANDOM / 100 ))
  do time adns-masterfile -s $SERVER -m 100 -qqqq <named_dump_reverse.db
  done

The dump file is available from https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/ipreg/named_dump_reverse.db - it contains about 350000 records from . to as - mainly in-add.arpa, which has a lot of broken authoritative servers and therefore is good for exercising serve-stale.

adns-masterfile comes from https://git.uis.cam.ac.uk/x/uis/ipreg/adns-masterfile.git

Relevant configuration files

I use the following options to enable serve-stale

        max-stale-ttl 1h;
        stale-answer-enable yes;

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

Here is an indication of how fast it is logging when in the bad state:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:01 named.log.1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:01 named.log.2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:01 named.log.3
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:01 named.log.4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:00 named.log.5
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:00 named.log.6
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:00 named.log.7
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:00 named.log.8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 named named  11M Apr 11 17:00 named.log.9