The performance of Zabbix is being constantly improved, and there were significant performance improvements back in 1.8. Then pretty much every Zabbix 1.8 series release added some more benefits, reduced database access and so on. With the 2.0 release there are more performance benefits expected, but there’s so little time to gather some information… luckily, some users do provide us with empirical evidence 🙂
Akademy, if you happen to not know about it, is a yearly KDE conference that’s followed by various workshops and other events. This year Akademy happened to be really close to the Zabbix home, Riga – just some 300 km away in Tallinn, capital of Estonia. We decided to find out whether Akademy was any good.
This came as the first assignment for me, a new Zabbix employee – to fix a bug ZBX-3788 zabbix daemon processes hang on futex
Sometimes terminating a Zabbix agent with “killall -15 zabbix_agentd” resulted in one hanging process and other processes in the <defunct> state. strace utility showed the process was hanging on futex:
Process 10468 attached - interrupt to quit futex(0xb783ca50, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL
Everything in the world of electronics gets smaller, while performance continues to grow. I know I should not compare those computers from 1960 with what we have now, but I still get amazed all the time.
The thing about modern computers is that sometimes it is a waste of resources to see them using a small fraction of their computing power to perform some very small task. It is like seeing a huge crane lifting a grocery paper bag. Of course, modern computers allow you to run many tasks simultaneously, sharing the power. You may use virtualization to run several logical machines on one device. But still sometimes there are cases when all you need is just a cheap, reliable, energy and space efficient device to do the work.
So when I heard that a company Observe IT from the UK, a potential partner of Zabbix, is willing to test-drive Raspberry Pi with Zabbix Proxy, I happily replied “Send it over here!”. It took more than 2 long weeks for British-Latvian post offices to deliver a very lightweight box to our office. While awaiting the package, we retweeted a message from Richard Gate about successfully installing Zabbix on Raspberry Pi. It made us jealous, but we were willing to see how it works ourselves.
So we started with a careful unpacking of the box.
83 in total of enthusiastic, smart and savvy nerds were fighting hard to get the first place in Zabbix Facebook quiz “Zabbix Nerd Spring 2012”. 6 sets of questions and 23 answer options have been evaluated, studied and passed, and finally on the 7th of July, 2012, Zabbix followers on Facebook, all quiz participants and our true fans have found out the two lucky winners of “Zabbix Nerd” quiz. 
Last weekend Zabbix team went to one of the animal welfare charities who are looking after abandoned dogs and cats, PatversmeLv in Riga, Latvia. The charity is accepting any help from people, so we decided to give it a maximum.
Our day began with choosing the right animal food and it was quite hard to be honest, because we wanted to bring as much as possible, but also wanted it to be tasty for them. After an hour of choosing we finally got what we wanted and went to the charity shelter.
We are very glad to announce to all of you that Zabbix 2.0 is out now and ready for you to download! While you are upgrading your systems, take your time to read a story about the Zabbix 2.0 release.
In the past Alexei said several times that if Zabbix 2.0 doesn’t come out on the set date, then he will eat his hat.
Japan IT Week is the largest IT exhibition in Asia. Every year over 1400 companies join this event to present their products to the IT industry, to share their business knowledge and to gain new business opportunities. By now the last day of Japan IT Week is over and we want to share with you our experience of participating in this great event.
Zabbix team participated in the Latvian Big Cleanup Day 2012 on Saturday, April 21.
So far, upgrading from one development 1.9 release or 2.0.0 release candidate to another was not officially supported. Only…
Zabbix agent currently supports only one server in active mode – the first host from the Server configuration parameter is used. While for most users that is enough, some installations require a more advanced approach with the agent being able to report to multiple servers in the active mode.
This year Zabbix Company were sponsors at the RTU Karjeras Diena (Career Day) exhibition, which was organized by the students from Riga Technical University (RTU). Apart from being a sponsor of the event, the company also had its own booth and gave a presentation on Zabbix.