Boost Plugin: When should I implement it?

[mhendr23]

My question, is there a ballpark figure as to how many devices Cacti can monitor before really needing the Boost plugin installed? As someone fresh out of school, this is the first business I have worked for as a Network Admin, so when reading the info on the plugin page for boost, I am not really sure what is considered a "large site".

Obviously, every network is going to be different, but after a failed attempt of installing Boost, I wondered if it would even make that big of a difference for me.

Currently, I am monitoring about 20 Cisco 2900 switches, 12 3550 routers, and within a few months will have approximately 30 different servers.

My Cacti server is running on a virtual server with 2gigs memory and 25gb of storage.

Cacti Version - 0.8.7i
Plugin Architecture - 3.1
Poller Type - Cactid v
Server Info - Linux 2.6.9-78.0.13.ELsmp
Web Server - Apache/2.0.63 (CentOS)
PHP - 5.1.6
PHP Extensions - libxml, xml, wddx, tokenizer, sysvshm, sysvsem, sysvmsg, standard, SimpleXML, sockets, SPL, shmop, session, Reflection, pspell, posix, mime_magic, iconv, hash, gmp, gettext, ftp, exif, date, curl, ctype, calendar, bz2, zlib, pcre, openssl, apache2handler, gd, ldap, mysql, mysqli, PDO, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, snmp, eAccelerator
MySQL - 5.0.82sp1
RRDTool - 1.2.23
SNMP - 5.1.2
Plugins

• PHP Network Weathermap (weathermap - v0.97a)
  Update Checker (update - v0.4)
  Host Info (hostinfo - v0.2)
  WMI Query (wmi - v0.1)
  tools
  ntop

[gandalf]

"Large" == SYSTEM STATS shows, that polling time approaches the polling interval (usually 300 sec).
In most cases, disk performance is the issue, then.
BOOST will perform sth very similar to SQL bulk import, but for rrd files.
This way, you "offload" the disk updates to asynchronous ones, performed by boost. Graphing will be intercepted, so the required updates will be in place just on demand.
That's the magic, in short terms
R.

[classen]

Currently, I am monitoring about 20 Cisco 2900 switches, 12 3550 routers, and within a few months will have approximately 30 different servers.

What are your polling stats currently?