Re: Nessus 3.0 released

[Renaud Deraison <deraison () nessus org>]

On Dec 13, 2005, at 15:43, Erin Carroll wrote:


> One key performance issue I've run into (and I'm prbably not alone  
> here)
> is the inability to easily manage the nessus server-side resource
> utilization when working with large numbers of hosts. While you can of
> course limit the number of consecutive scans, or even nice nessusd  
> itself,
> there are many cases where the resource bottleneck is due to a  
> particular
> plugin or a well filtered host (as you allude). Is there capability  
> within
> the engine itself (or plans to implement) a way for nessusd to set
> resource limits that don't rely on variables like the # of scanned
> hosts/concurrent scan threads? I.e. nessus can use up to X %age of
> available memory/cpu/IO and self-throttle.

nessusd 3 throttles itself but only if the CPU is badly overloaded  
('throttle_scan' in nessusd.conf). That is, if the CPU is overloaded  
then the number of hosts scanned in parallel will go down, until the  
load average is 'sane' again. However at the moment it's more a  
safety belt than something which should be depended on -- basically  
the 'sanity' of the load average directly depends on how many hosts  
you wanted to test in the first place.

This kind of feature will be more suitable in Nessus 3.2 which will  
be the 'part two' of our global optimization process.

In terms of max_checks, you should keep it to a reasonable value (ie:  
4) -- anything too high is likely to interfere too much with the  
remote host otherwise (think inetd closing ports on older Unices).



                                        -- Renaud

--
Renaud Deraison
http://www.nessus.org
http://www.tenablesecurity.com

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