There recently have been some quite impressive improvements to node synchronisation (distributed monitoring cornerstone). First, Zabbix 1.8.1 improved single database index, which in a testing environment improved initial node synchronisation from approximately 15 minutes to one minute, 40 seconds (measuring time when node can resume communication with other hosts). Further code improvements brought this down to only 18 seconds.

These code changes so far are only available in SVN versions (or development snapshots). If you are interested in distributed monitoring, make sure to try this out and give some feedback.

If you were using distributed setup before version 1.8.1, make sure to change the index as instructed in 1.8.1 release notes.