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I'm trying to get the memory footprint of my server as low as possible.

When I run htop I get the following:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/iHnr7.png

As you can see there are 5 bind processes running but since I use a third party DNS can I kill them all?

Can you post anything else I'm doing wrong? I see multiple fail2ban processes also, is this necessary?

Edit: That's 5 threads, thanks fuscata.

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Why are you trying to reduce your memory footprint? You've got LOTS of free RAM, so absent other considerations I wouldn't obsess over it. Also if you're asking if a process is necessary you need to do more research on your configuration first (Question 1: Are you using that local DNS server for something? Question 2: Are you using Fail2Ban?) – voretaq7♦ Sep 9 '11 at 21:45
I actually don't know if BIND is being used. It's a fresh install of Ubuntu server edition, so unless BIND is being used for something out of the box then I guess that's a no. I am using fail2ban for security purposes. I want to reduce memory footprint before I put the server into production. – Ash Sep 9 '11 at 21:48
Just a follow-up. I've had BIND disabled for nearly 24 hours now and there have been no issues. – Ash Sep 10 '11 at 22:17
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fail2ban helps protect you against brute-force password guessing attacks (it reads your logs for login failures and then blocks the IP) Unless you have serious memory constraints or no external connections it understands how to monitor, then I would leave it running.

As for bind, if that server is not hosting DNS for your domain (check your domain's whois info to confirm that it's not one of your listed nameservers) you might be able to shut it off. Make sure that no other computer is configured to use it as their DNS server, and that your /etc/resolv.conf lists some other DNS server.

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I set fail2ban up but does it really need 5 processes? It's a lone dedicated server that relies entirely on third party DNS, so does that make it ok to shutoff? – Ash Sep 9 '11 at 21:52
Agereed. DerfK is saying that if your server is not hosting the DNS records for any domain (which you'd probably know) then you can safely turn it off. You can stop it from starting on boot with update-rc.d bind9 remove – xofer Sep 9 '11 at 21:57
"fail2ban ... need 5 processes?" -- see my answer. f2b is using 5 threads not processes – xofer Sep 9 '11 at 21:58
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Keep in mind that htop shows threads, not just processes. In that case, it lists the memory usage of the process for each thread. (Notice that the memory columns are all the same for each fail2ban thread.) You can hit F5 to see threads in a tree list.

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