Improving startup times with pre-cached object files

In this recipe, we'll learn how to shorten startup times for large and/or complex Nagios Core configurations. This is done by pre-caching the Nagios Core objects from the configuration, applying all appropriate template and group expansions into a single file that Nagios Core can read much more quickly than a more modular and human-readable configuration.

This will likely only be of interest to you if you are monitoring more than a hundred hosts or services with a reasonably complex template and grouping layout, as suggested by some of the recipes in Chapter 1 and Chapter 9. It will still work on smaller installations, but the gains in startup speed are likely to be minimal.

If you are only running a small setup, then this recipe might be of interest if you want to better understand how Nagios Core expands a configuration that uses a lot of templates and other configuration tricks.

Getting ready

You should be running a Nagios Core 3.0 or...