Any published guidelines on resources used by Relay functionality?

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by lmchavez91)

Hi, we have a customer that is asking 'if I enable the Relay functionality on one of my existing servers, how much resource (CPU, memory, disk) will it need. What we usually tell people is that they need between 50-100 GB of disk space, but I am not sure what to tell the for CPU/memory. Do you have any standards published as to how much memory/CPU the relay will consume when it is run on a server with other applications? Thank you!

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi lmchavez,

More Relay info is here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/Tivoli%20Endpoint%20Manager/page/BigFix%20Relays

But that doesn’t exactly answer your question… Generally, the question of relay load is almost completely determined by how many agents you have reporting and how many new actions are being pushed.

Generally speaking, we see these attributes for the relay:

  • Minimal memory – I want to say that it is typical for <20MB of memory, but this isn’t a hard limit.
  • Minimal CPU – Most of the relay activities are fairly simple web requests that are not CPU intensive… Although sometimes when big files are pushed, the relay will need to check the sha1 hash, which uses a little bit of CPU (usually for just a couple seconds).
  • Minimal disk IO – Basic web file serving activities seem pretty easy for the relay (although again depends on how many files are being requested by agents).
  • Minimal disk space – default cache size is 1GB… 50 GB caches are great if you have the disk space because it increases cache hits, but aren’t required…

Another way to look at this is that there are tens-to-hundreds of thousands of relays installed on shared servers for file, print, AD, AV, etc. I can’t even think of the last time someone complained about relays taking too many resources…

We used to tell customers that they should put relays on their own desktops so they could see firsthand how light on the system they were…

Ben