Nagios XI load average is high

[TBT]

Our Nagios XI installation is under CentOS 6 in a Virtual environment with two 2.66Ghz CPUs, 4GB RAM and storage is shared between other Virtual Machines on a SAN.
Currently we have 67 Hosts and 878 Services with many more network elements to be populated. Polling intervals remain default.

According to the Service Statistics dashlet load averages are getting rather high (see below).

2012-04-02 13:04:14 localhost Current Load CRITICAL HARD 4 of 4 CRITICAL - load average: 7.18, 4.79, 4.03
2012-04-02 12:49:14 localhost Current Load WARNING HARD 4 of 4 WARNING - load average: 5.70, 3.98, 3.93
2012-04-02 10:29:15 localhost Current Load CRITICAL HARD 4 of 4 CRITICAL - load average: 7.32, 5.28, 4.09
2012-04-02 10:24:15 localhost Current Load WARNING HARD 4 of 4 WARNING - load average: 7.17, 5.10, 3.81
2012-04-02 09:41:15 localhost Current Load OK HARD 4 of 4 OK - load average: 1.00, 2.44, 2.96
2012-04-02 09:31:15 localhost Current Load WARNING HARD 4 of 4 WARNING - load average: 1.20, 3.36, 3.30
2012-04-02 08:18:15 localhost Current Load OK HARD 4 of 4 OK - load average: 3.00, 2.67, 2.97
2012-04-02 07:33:15 localhost Current Load WARNING HARD 4 of 4 WARNING - load average: 4.10, 3.23, 3.08
2012-04-02 07:15:14 localhost Current Load OK HARD 4 of 4 OK - load average: 2.15, 2.94, 2.98

1. What are the actual hardware requirements for Nagios XI?
2. How many elements (hosts/services) can a single Nagios XI server handle?
3. I've considered offloading MySQL to a remote server and skimmed over the Nagios performance tuning tips. What would you recommend as starting point?

[lmiltchev]

1. What are the actual hardware requirements for Nagios XI?

Server OS:

32-bit RHEL 5.x/6.x or CentOS 5.x/6.x

Minimum system specs:

1 GHz Processor
512 MB RAM
8 GB HD

Recommended system specs:

2+ GHz Processor
2 GB RAM
40 GB HD
RAID 5 Drive Configuration

For more information on the hardware requirements needed to run Nagios XI, please, read this document:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... ements.pdf

2. How many elements (hosts/services) can a single Nagios XI server handle?

See the answer of question 1.

3. I've considered offloading MySQL to a remote server and skimmed over the Nagios performance tuning tips. What would you recommend as starting point?

Please, review this document:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... Server.pdf

Actually, reviewing the whole "Boosting Performance" section in the Administrator's Guide would be probably beneficial to you:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... p#boosting

Hope this helps.