Zabbix Performance Question

[Kerrygeek]

I am adding devices to my new Zabbix server and had a question about performance. I'm using a dual Xeon with 4gigs of ram running CentOS 5.2. On the dashboard the "required server performance is 8.0332" and my load average is 0.3 to 0.4 on the server. I'm up to 40 hosts and 249 items monitored so far and still have a lot more to add. I'm not using the agents anywhere, only snmp. About half the items I have left to add won't have anything but a ping to them, the rest will be servers and routers with ping and I'll also be monitoring bandwidth, cpu, etc., all with snmp.

How high can I push those two number (server performance and load average) before I need to start worrying? Just curious. How far have you guys pushed a single Zabbix server before you had to start adding more?

Thanks,
Kerry

[Alexei]

I think you should seriously start thinking about performance tuning after around 150-200 checks per second. For a start, make sure that you monitor only required parameters. Also pay attention to items refresh intervals. And do not forget to tune number of pollers and finally enable database cache (StartDBSyncers=1) in zabbix_server.conf.

[Kerrygeek]

Alexei,
Ok, thanks, that means I've got lots of room to expand. I just changed some of the parameters in the conf file so I'll see how that goes. I don't see that line in my zabbix_server.conf file, do I just need to add it? If so, can I add it anywhere in the file?

Kerry
Up to 50 hosts, 568 items monitored and 10.04 new values per sec.

[charlesg]

I know this is an old thread but fell right in line with what I needed.

I'm currently at: hosts/160, items/4556, triggers/1357 and nvps/154.65. I am running into performance issues with some items getting delayed by 2-3 minutes.

I have some steps already planning to tune the zabbix_server.conf StartDBSyncers=1, switch to DBSocket and adjust StartPollers and StartTrappers).

I would also like to better maintain my items and triggers...

Does anybody have tips on find duplicate items items on multiple templates for example, or items that are constantly timing out but for which there are no triggers. Or anything else that would be considered a waste of cycle for my Zabbix server.

Thanks.

[Kerrygeek]

Look for the database tuning info in these forums, giving the MySQL database more memory made all the difference in the world on mine. It was a real dog before that, once I gave it more memory in the MySQL config file it got much better and has been pretty snappy since then.

What kind of machine are you using? I've got 2 Xeon 2.5GHz processors and 4 gigs of ram running on CentOS 5, top shows my load average to be about 1.3, most of it being mysqld.

One thing I did was to set up a cron job to bounce it once a month, I found that it was running out of swap every 90 days or so. That may be fixed by now, I'm on 1.6.4 still, I upgraded it once but it's working so well I hate to mess with it!

Right now my dashboard says 212 hosts, 2075 monitored items and 288 enabled triggers with the new values per second of 38.11.

Hope that helps, start with the database tuning, that's where I got my best bang for the time invested. The syntax is picky, make sure you're doing it right or it won't have any effect at all! Use the script "mysqltuner" and do what it says but you have to temper that with what the guys said here in the forum, you can't take the mysqltuner results as gospel. It also wants the server to be running a day or so before it gives consistent results.

Good luck!
Kerry