2 Performance tuning

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

2.1 Hardware

General advices 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
User fast RAID storage
Use fast Ethernet adapter
Having more memory is always better

2.2 Operating System

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

2.3 Zabbix configuration parameters

Many parameters may be tuned to get optimal performance.

2.3.1 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.

2.4 Database Engine

This is probably most important part of Zabbix tuning. Zabbix heavily depends on 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 of MySQL temporary files in tmpfs is recommended

2.5 General advices

monitor required parameters only
tune 'Update interval' for all items. Keeping 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 same information.

Example: why use system[procload],system[procload5] andsystem[procload15] if system[procload] contains all.

avoid use of triggers with long period given as function argument. For example, max(3600) will be calculated significantly slower than max(60).

Documentation