With the recent changes to the Nagios core development team, patches have been flooding in to the nagios-devel list. There's been such a flurry of improvements that I've actually had to stop working on Ninja and Merlin entirely over the past two weeks and just work on testing, adding and commenting on patches sent to the list. In view of that, I must say I'm convinced Ethan did the right thing when he extended the core dev team a bit.

However, this post is mostly about one particular patch from a guy named Jean Gabès. The patch speeds up Nagios' circular-parent-child dependency checks a *lot*. In a network 300 levels deep (root-host -> lvl1-child -> lvl2-child -> ... -> lvl300-child) where each level in itself has 500 hosts, vanilla Nagios had to be Ctrl-C'd out of after 53 minutes, while Nagios with Jean's patch completed in less than seven seconds (a speedup of more than 51000%!).

For a more modest network of 15000 nodes, (30 levels deep, 500 hosts in each level), vanilla Nagios completed a configuration check in 3 minutes and 33 seconds, while patched Nagios did the exact same job in less than one second.

Awesome, Jean. Thanks a lot indeed :-)