Keywords: Supervision, Icinga, Nagios, Linux

8.8. Temporary Data
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## 8.8. Temporary Data

Several files are created while starting Icinga and processed very often during runtime. Depending on the size of your configuration this may lead to high I/O and therefore degraded responsiveness. To reduce physical I/O operations it might be a good idea to place temporary files on a RAM disk. The following lines show the steps to setup a RAM disk and the changes to the main config file.

| Note
Please keep in mind that these files will be lost if you reboot the system. Also note that sometimes it is difficult to determine the size of these files which may lead to a full RAM disk.

1. Have a look at the current location of the status file (e.g. `/usr/local/icinga/var/status.dat`) and the object cache file (e.g. `/usr/local/icinga/var/objects.cache`) and determine the size of both files. Add the size of the status file for temporary data (temp_file).

        #> ls -la /usr/local/icinga/var/
        -rw-rw-r--   1 icinga icinga 8.2M Jun 10 11:57 status.dat
        -rw-r--r--   1 icinga icinga 5.9M Jun 10 11:58 objects.cache

2. Increase the number to a considerable value to allow for future growth (100 MB should be sufficient in this case) and create the RAM disk.

   | Caution
   If the value is too high then this will throttle your system because it will start to swap resulting in physical I/O once again.

        #> mkdir /var/icinga/ramdisk
        #> mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /var/icinga/ramdisk -o size=100m
        #> chown icinga:icinga /var/icinga/ramdisk

   Adapt the values of user and group to the ones found in your configuration if necessary.

3. Add an entry to `/etc/fstab` to make the setting permanent so the RAM disk will be created automatically after the next reboot.

       tmpfs                /var/icinga/ramdisk     tmpfs   size=100m        0 0

4. Edit the Icinga main configuration file and change the setting of the appropriate directives

        #object_cache_file=/usr/local/icinga/var/objects.cache
        object_cache_file=/var/icinga/ramdisk/objects.cache

        #status_file=/usr/local/icinga/var/status.dat
        status_file=/var/icinga/ramdisk/status.dat

        #temp_file=/usr/local/icinga/var/icinga.tmp
        temp_file=/var/icinga/ramdisk/icinga.tmp

5. Restart Icinga to put the changes into effect

        #> /etc/init.d/icinga restart

You may want to use the RAM disk for other files like the check results as well. Please increase the size of the RAM disk if necessary and change the directive in the main config file

     check_result_path=/var/icinga/ramdisk/checkresults

Please make sure that addons like check_mk are aware of this change.

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