This has been driving me nuts for some time now.... I have a named process that is always showing up at the top of my process list. It's always sleeping but will spike cpu usage up to 100% at times, when sleeping..

If I don't kill the process and restart named server it runs forever or until named crashes and restarts itself.

All other named processes run normally... Run for a second and sleep again.

Is this normal?

Thanks for any input.

Perhaps try blocking recursive DNS lookups. If that still fails you could try to strace -f -p PID and see if you can figure out what domain it is querying or what is up.