We are currently evaluating the use of baselines. I note that from looking at the action files each baseline seems to concatenate all the relevances of all the fixlets, thus potentialy doubling the relevance when comparing to the same actions deployed seperatley.
What is the performance penalty incurred client-side as a result of using a baseline vs individually deployed actions?
In an environment where the time taken to patch a box is critical, are baselines recommended?
The relevance is copied into the baselines as a way to guarantee that whatever action/relevance that you approved for the baseline does not change. For instance, most people wouldn’t be very happy if they created a baseline to deploy a few Fixlets and then BigFix changed a Fixlet (for whatever reason) that then triggered the action to run without anyone knowing about it or being able to stop it.
To answer your question directly: The agent can handle thousands of Fixlets and open actions without too much trouble and on most computers, it can complete a full evaluation cycle checking all Fixlets/action in a few minutes. Baselines do add to the work that needs to be done, but as long as you don’t make the baselines too big (less than 50 Fixlets per baseline is a good rule of thumb for the current version), then you should be OK.
Generally speaking, a multiple action group is roughly the same as a baseline action in terms of most performance metrics (although there are some differences).
In any case, the BES Client knows that newly taken actions (from Baseline or from Fixlets) should be evaluated immediately so generally you shouldn’t have to wait long after you take an action to see it start running on the agents (most of the time this will just a minute or two). If you have a system in place where you first take the action, then later trigger the action by some mechanism outside of BigFix, then the agent will need to “notice” which action you triggered and that will take a few minutes longer.
Note also that we are constantly making new improvements to the BES Client evaluation times and pretty much every version of the BES Client should be faster to evaluate than the previous version.