Platform for Zabbix

[n0name]

Please answer,

Whet platform (hardware) you use for Zabbix ?
How many hosts & items you monitor ?

Thank you.

[mdouhan]

many hosts

we run SUSE enterprise server on a HP blade server

4 CPUs
16 GB RAM
1.5 TB disk on a HP EVA SAN

over 4k hosts
over 60k items

[cstackpole]

We use an HP DL320 G3 Xeon 3Ghz with 8GB of memory.
Currently we have about 90 hosts with about 3k of items. This system runs everything Zabbix (frontend, server, mysql, ect).
Avg load is about 3-6 (yeah, I know that is high. It is almost entirely MySQL too!)

[exkg]

Hi mdouhan,

Which database have u ? Im trying zabbix-1.5.3 and Oracle 10G. We have ~1.3k hosts and a lot of host groups/screens (~150) and performance is poor to access screens (view and configuration).

[Palmertree]

I am currently monitoring about active 1202 host and about active 166,000 active items on one master and child node. To get best performance you need run your processes on separate boxes. So there is hope.

I would separate them as follows:
1. Run your web frontend on separate box with php caching, compression and apache tweaks (plenty of info on the web for tweaking).
2. Run your database on a seperate box and let mysql use all the memory it can. 8 gigs is preferred. Also, tweak your mysqld (my.cnf) settings. Log unindexed queries so that you can add indexes where need. This made a very big improvement for me. Also, I replaced all database updates and inserts with "insert low_priority" and "update low_priority" to reduce table deadlocks from the pollers trying to query for next polling status.
3. Run your pollers on a separate box and make sure your network settings on this box are tweaked in the sysctl.conf and plenty of semaphore space for dbaching.

With 1202 host and 166,000 here is my master database server load. Hard to believe. I usually have the load less than 1 but reports are running against the database. Web frontend is fast because of the compression and caching on the php server and low load on the database due to optimized indexes.

Master Database Server (8 gigs, dual cpu):

top - 23:33:24 up 16:41,  1 user,  load average: 1.25, 1.32, 1.35
Tasks:  99 total,   1 running,  98 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.7%us,  2.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 84.9%id,  2.8%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.9%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8136376k total,  8090464k used,    45912k free,    40292k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,       44k used,  2031564k free,  1861476k cached

[teferi]

Log unindexed queries so that you can add indexes where need. This made a very big improvement for me.

How did you do that? Couldn't find any mention about it in the doc.

Our zabbix instalation is:
FreeBSD 7.0, AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ ,4 Gigs of mem
That's for the master server, there are also 3 proxies, that actually do the monitoring.
Monitoring ~1k hosts with about 20k items.

P.S. almost everything is a subject to change as the installation we run right now is a testing one

[anrstone]

Hi Palmertree

I'm in the process of starting to load up our Zabbix server and have started to optimise the Apache instance. You mentioned a wealth of info on performance tuning apache and php which there is. Would you mind posting up links to any sites you found particulalry useful especially with respect to PHP optimisation and caching.

Many thanks

Nick

[bashman]

http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php

http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html#Performance_Tuning_by_Tweaking_Apache_Configuration