High load on nagios server

Nagios Nagios Configuration support
1

Hi,

I have a nagios server that has about 60 hosts and 540 services. The load on the server sometime gets very high and it affects service check where we time how long it takes for a query to run on database servers. We graphed the load average for our nagios server and found that every hour there is a spike in load average. The load average would be on 0.3 and it would peak to 1.8 (occasionly to 3) and then back down to 0.3, this load average pattern repeats roughly every hour. Can anyone tell me why nagios is acting this way i.e. the load jumps significantly, and how it can be fixed?

The specfication for the nagios server is as follow:

  • nagios is the only thing running on the server (version 3.0.3)
  • LInux Gentoo 1.12.6
  • AMD Athlon 3700+ single core, 2G ram
  • A quick look at ‘top’ shows that the CPU is about 50% utilized and very small percentage of io wait.
  • Memory usage is about 65%

Thanks in advance

Jack

2

are you sure it’s nagios and not some other cronjob or similar creating the cpu usage spike?

3

Yes its from nagios, that was the first thing I checked.

4

did you cahnge teh default settings for the scheduling in nagios.cfg?