The "race" to be the first thread using a socket is caused by the slave views inheriting "notify yes;" from global configuration. It causes a NOTIFY to be immediately sent back to view "a" from views "b" and "c" after view "a" notifies views "b" and "c" about a zone update. As these duplicate NOTIFY messages serve no purpose in this check, disabling them will stabilize the test by working around the kernel bug mentioned. While investigating this issue, I also noticed that junk gets logged when using "also-notify { key ; };". This is caused by a misplaced call to isc_sockaddr_format(). Please review rt46516. It fixes both problems mentioned above. IMHO, these fixes should be merged as two separate commits without a CHANGES note, but if anyone feels otherwise, I have no strong feelings about it, so please just let me know.