10 Performance tuning

Overview

It is very important to have Zabbix system properly tuned for maximum performance.

Hardware

General advice on hardware:

• Use fastest processor available
• SCSI or SAS is better than IDE (performance of IDE disks may be significantly improved by using utility hdparm) and SATA
• 15K RPM is better than 10K RPM which is better than 7200 RPM
• Use fast RAID storage
• Use fast Ethernet adapter
• Having more memory is always better

Operating system

• Use latest (stable!) version of OS
• Exclude unnecessary functionality from kernel
• Tune kernel parameters

Zabbix configuration parameters

Many parameters may be tuned to get optimal performance.

zabbix_server

StartPollers

General rule - keep value of this parameter as low as possible. Every additional instance of zabbix_server adds known overhead, in the same time, parallelism is increased. Optimal number of instances is achieved when queue, on average, contains minimum number of parameters (ideally, 0 at any given moment). This value can be monitored by using internal check zabbix[queue].

DebugLevel

Optimal value is 3.

DBSocket

MySQL only. It is recommended to use DBSocket for connection to the database. That is the fastest and the most secure way.

Database engine

This is probably the most important part of Zabbix tuning. Zabbix heavily depends on the availability and performance of database engine.

• use fastest database engine, i.e. MySQL
• use stable release of a database engine
• rebuild MySQL or PostgreSQL from sources to get maximum performance
• follow performance tuning instructions taken from MySQL or PostgreSQL documentation
• for MySQL, use InnoDB table structure
• ZABBIX works at least 1.5 times faster (comparing to MyISAM) if InnoDB is used. This is because of increased parallelism. However, InnoDB requires more CPU power.
• tuning the database server for the best performance is highly recommended.
• keep database tables on different hard disks
• 'history', 'history_str, 'items' 'functions', triggers', and 'trends' are most heavily used tables.
• for large installations keeping MySQL temporary files in tmpfs is:
  • MySQL >= 5.5: not recommended (MySQL bug #58421)
  • MySQL < 5.5: recommended

GUI debugging

Problems related to the frontend performance may be diagnosed using the frontend debug mode.

General advice

• monitor required parameters only
• tune 'Update interval' for all items. Keeping a small update interval may be good for nice graphs, however, this may overload Zabbix
• tune parameters for default templates
• tune housekeeping parameters
• do not monitor parameters which return the same information.
• avoid the use of triggers with long period given as function argument. For example, max(3600) will be calculated significantly slower than max(60).

See also

1. How to configure optimal count of zabbix processes