---
title: "Setting Journal Size for Secondary Servers"
slug: "setting-journal-size-for-secondary-servers"
description: "The journal reduces the cost of rewriting complete zone files; the IXFR gets appended to the journal."
updated: 2021-05-04T21:12:28Z
published: 2021-05-04T21:12:28Z
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://kb.isc.org/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Setting Journal Size for Secondary Servers

### Do I need a journal on secondary servers?

The journal reduces the cost of rewriting complete zone files; basically, the IXFR gets appended to the journal when it occurs.

For BIND 9.11 and earlier, we recommend setting the journal size to some modest non-zero size (64KB to 1MB).

If you have any large frequently-updated zones, they might benefit from a bigger journal to reduce zone file rewrites. There's a minimum journal size (approximately 1KB), so even if you set `max-journal-size` to 0 (or any other tiny value) it is rounded up to the minimum.

Starting in BIND 9.12, `max-journal-size` is automatically set based on the zone size, so you should be able to remove any `max-journal-size` settings from your configuration.