[mrtg] Has anyone used a RAMdisk to speed up MRTG?

[Jim Johnson]

>From what I've read in this mailing list, MRTG's major bottleneck is disk
I/O.  What I'm thinking of doing is creating a ramdisk for the MRTG working
directory so that all log file manipulation would take place in RAM.  I
would then schedule another cron job to run hourly that would backup the log
files to the physical hard disk.

The reason that I'm looking at doing this is that I want to be able to
monitor a large number of devices (about 75) with MRTG from one Linux box.
Right now I'm monitoring 25 devices.  My Pentium 166 running RH Linux 6.0
takes 3:40 (mins:secs) for 3 different instances of MRTG (each polling a 3rd
of my devices) to finish running.  If I run all of the targets from just one
config (and therefore one instance of MRTG) the run time only goes up to 4
mins.  It doesn't seem to me like running multiple instances of MRTG is that
much faster.  Are these numbers out to lunch?  How many devices should I
expect to be able to monitor with one Linux box?

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