Home
Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
Infrastructure
The main factor that affects the performance of the BigFix Inventory server is the performance of the underlying infrastructure on which the application server and the DB2 database are running. You must ensure that the recommended requirements are met.
Using relays to increase the performance of BigFix
To take advantage of the speed and scalability that is offered by BigFix, it is often necessary to tune the settings of the BigFix deployment.

Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
- Infrastructure
  The main factor that affects the performance of the BigFix Inventory server is the performance of the underlying infrastructure on which the application server and the DB2 database are running. You must ensure that the recommended requirements are met.
  - Memory performance requirements
    RAM performance metrics such as seek time or memory bandwidth, are strictly dependent on the memory type, which is linked with the processor type.
  - Storage performance requirements
    To ensure good performance of BigFix Inventory, it is essential to have good storage performance on the database server computer. The storage performance of the BigFix Inventory server alone is not that important.
  - Using relays to increase the performance of BigFix
    To take advantage of the speed and scalability that is offered by BigFix, it is often necessary to tune the settings of the BigFix deployment.
- Setting up scans and import
  Learn how to improve the scanning and importing activities to optimize the performance in your infrastructure.
- Additional tasks for improving performance
  Learn about additional tasks that you might want to perform to improve the performance in your infrastructure.
- Tuning performance in medium and large environments
  You can learn the possible causes of the most common performance issues in medium and large environments. Follow the tips and the known solutions to these issues to keep the system in good shape and avoid performance problems.
- REST API considerations
  You can use BigFix Inventory REST API to retrieve large amounts of data that is related to computer systems, software instances, and license usage in your environment. Such information can then be passed to other applications for further processing and analysis.

Using relays to increase the performance of BigFix

To take advantage of the speed and scalability that is offered by BigFix, it is often necessary to tune the settings of the BigFix deployment.

A relay is a client that is enhanced with a relay service. It performs all client actions to protect the host computer, and in addition, delivers content and software downloads to child clients and relays. Instead of requiring every networked computer to directly access the server, relays can be used to offload much of the burden. Hundreds of clients can point to a relay for downloads, which in turn makes only a single request to the server. Relays can connect to other relays as well, further increasing efficiency.

Reducing the BigFix server load

For all but the smallest BigFix deployments (< 500 BigFix clients), a primary BigFix relay should be set for each BigFix client even if they are not in a remote location.

The reason for this is that the BigFix server performs many tasks including:

Gathering new Fixlet content from the BigFix server
Distributing new Fixlet content to the clients
Accepting and processing reports from the BigFix clients
Providing data for the BigFix consoles
Sending downloaded files (which can be large) to the BigFix client, and much more.

By using BigFix relays, the burden of communicating directly with every client is effectively moved to a different computer (the BigFix relay computer), which frees the BigFix server to do other tasks. If the relays are not used, you might observe that performance degrades significantly when an action with a download is sent to the BigFix server.

Setting up BigFix relays in appropriate places and correctly configuring clients to use them is the most important change that has highest impact on performance. To configure a relay, you can:

Allow the clients to auto-select their closest BigFix relay.
Manually configure the BigFix clients to use a specific relay.

For more information, see Managing relays.