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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.
Setting up scans and import
Learn how to improve the scanning and importing activities to optimize the performance in your infrastructure.
Dividing the infrastructure into scan groups
To avoid running into performance issues, you should divide the computers in your infrastructure into scan groups and properly set the scan schedule. You should start by creating a benchmark scan group on which you can try different configurations to achieve optimal import time. After the import time is satisfactory for the benchmark group, you can divide the rest of your infrastructure into analogous scan groups.
Recommendations for the service provider environments
The service provider functionality is used to create separate subcapacity reports for different sets of computers. You can create such a report for each computer group. By default, the calculation of PVU and RVU MAPC consumption is disabled for new computer groups. After you enable it, a computer group becomes a subcapacity computer group, and can have its own subcapacity report. This, however, impacts performance due to increased number of subcapacity calculations.

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.
- Setting up scans and import
  Learn how to improve the scanning and importing activities to optimize the performance in your infrastructure.
  - Good practices for running scans and imports
    Apply the good practices when running scans and imports to ensure that your infrastructure works efficiently.
  - Dividing the infrastructure into scan groups
    To avoid running into performance issues, you should divide the computers in your infrastructure into scan groups and properly set the scan schedule. You should start by creating a benchmark scan group on which you can try different configurations to achieve optimal import time. After the import time is satisfactory for the benchmark group, you can divide the rest of your infrastructure into analogous scan groups.
    - Scan schedule
      It is critical for BigFix Inventory performance that you accurately schedule scans in the scan groups in your environment. If the configuration is not well-balanced, you might experience long import times.
    - Recommendations for the service provider environments
      The service provider functionality is used to create separate subcapacity reports for different sets of computers. You can create such a report for each computer group. By default, the calculation of PVU and RVU MAPC consumption is disabled for new computer groups. After you enable it, a computer group becomes a subcapacity computer group, and can have its own subcapacity report. This, however, impacts performance due to increased number of subcapacity calculations.
- 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.

Recommendations for the service provider environments

The service provider functionality is used to create separate subcapacity reports for different sets of computers. You can create such a report for each computer group. By default, the calculation of PVU and RVU MAPC consumption is disabled for new computer groups. After you enable it, a computer group becomes a subcapacity computer group, and can have its own subcapacity report. This, however, impacts performance due to increased number of subcapacity calculations.

If you decide to create more than 10 subcapacity computer groups, adjust the use of CPU resources and tune the default configuration of BigFix Inventory. The most important processes for subcapacity computer groups are aggregation and reaggregation. Performance of these processes depends on the maximum number of threads that can be run for the calculations, which by default is 2. You improve performance by increasing the number of available threads.

To increase the number of available threads, specify the values of the maxAggregationThreads and maxReaggregationThreads parameters. To specify the values of these parameters, log in to BigFix Inventory and go to Management > Advanced Server Settings. In general, you should provide two processor cores for each thread on your database server. For example, if you can provide 12 processor cores for the aggregation process itself, increase the number of threads to 6 by specifying maxAggregationThreads=6. For more information, see: Advanced server settings.