While Domestik aims having the little footprint as possible on monitored machines, technologies used may require particular attention at the server side.

Obviously, the larger data stored, the longest the time to manage them. To ensure best performances, keep in mind :

• to keep only data really needed : you can play with probes' archiving and purge to remove too old to be useful data.
• You may also reduce the interval between maintenance to reduce drastically the time needed for each of them
• In extreme cases, if automatic purging is too heavy for your server, you may envisage to remove automated purging and schedule external script to do the purge.

A rule of thumb is to always think twice while adding a new monitored host :

• Are you sure all figures are needed ? As example, CPU load for an end user machine is not always useful.
• If busy server need fine grained data, a quiet one or end user computer can afford larger sampling interval. As an example, hddtemp and smartmontools (widely used hard drive diagnostic tools) are configured by default to query disks' health on 30 minutes basis ... do you really need more frequent information for other figures ?

A database is used :

• to ensure internal data exchange and activities management
• to keep track of hosts' figures for trend alerting
• to keep track of hosts' figures in order to conduct capacity planning

If the database is pointed as a bottleneck, several actions can solve the issue :

• Ensure the database resources requirements are met (does your server swapping ?)
• Ensure database consistency, especially that indexes are correctly built and used
• Fine tune the database engine : most of database come with performance white papers, your first reading in case of performance problems

Due to the nature of web services usage, your web server will be spamed by frequent tiny requests.

Have a look on Apache best practices focusing on web server serving lot of small queries and not using "keep alive".

To reduce Apache activities, think also to :

• reduce the number of concurrent alerting agent (like desktop widget, browser stick on Domestik's status page, ...)
• enlarge the frequency of these agent pollings
• you may also pack several data bundles in one query (i.e : cache 5 figure samples at client side and send them altogether ; 1 connection instead of 5).