I looked at specific server trends over time and there is no incremental pattern while looking at a single box -- it could be 20 seconds lower the second day, 40 seconds higher the third, etc. This variability is probably due to two factors: the general activity on the target box (if it's working hard it may respond more slowly), and the fact that the local process could be resource impacted due to parallel maxing out connections.

I would love to but I have a restriction of not being allowed to write anything to any of the remote servers. Another factor is that these servers are constantly flipping between up and down due to maintenance and a crontab script would not run reliably.

The idea was to get ahead of potential problems or catch things that other monitoring tools weren't looking at. It is not the solution I wanted, but it's what someone higher up signed off on.

Yes, actually. The SCP segment of the code downloads to an NFS parition... I will investigate this.


Thank you for your suggestions! I'll let you know how things go when I dig into this.