Concise Guide to DNS and BIND, The

Moderating BIND

To alleviate high costs, BIND offers the following option in the options section of named.conf:

options {
    ...
    dialup yes;
    heartbeat-interval 360;
    ...
};

When this option executes, BIND concentrates maintenance activities (which normally are spread out over time) to a short time interval, so it occurs all at once. This activity occurs once every heartbeat interval minute. The heartbeat interval number should be many times higher than your dial-up connection timeout. If your timeout is 15 minutes and you set your heartbeat interval to 4 hours, BIND causes as many as 6 connections in 24 hours—in other words, roughly 90 minutes of connection time per day for nothing. Shortening the timeout and increasing the heartbeat interval ...