Max Patches Per Hour Calculation

Usage and Config Patch
1

(imported topic written by arpotu91)

Hello,

I’m trying to give an estimate to management of how many patches Bigfix can lay down on a server in a 2 hour window. My “thumb” estimate is 3 mins per patch, which comes out to:

120minutes/3minutes = 40 patches per two hours

If you subtract 6 minutes for a reboot, then you’re looking at (38 patches + 1 reboot in 2 hours, per server). I know there’s some additional overhead for relevance checking, transferring the file over the network, etc, but those add much complexity to calculating the number I’m aiming at.

Now, if I talk to admins of very large Bigfix deployments, I hear things like “I can patch 125,000 endpoints in one night”, but I haven’t heard how many patches they’re trying to lay down.

Does anyone have a good method (better than “thumb”) of calculating this estimate?

Thanks,

Arpotu.

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

The main factors that would affect this time is:

  • How big are the patches?
  • How much bandwidth is available between the relays and clients?
  • How long does it take the patches themselves to run?

If we are talking about typical hotfixes in a typical environment where the relays are pretty close to the relays, then I would think that your “couple minutes a patch” estimate is pretty close…

Ben