Developer's Guide

Python's native storage for storing data is called a Pickle. Pickle files are used by zenperfsnmp for caching configuration information gathered from zenhub. This is a performance enhancement for dealing with startup communications with zenhub, as larger sites with hundreds or more devices could experience enough of a delay during initialization that Zenoss would have difficulty functioning until the configuration information had been gathered. Every update from the Zenoss server (which is dealt with by zenhub) causes zenperfsnmp to update the pickle files.

The pickle files are kept in the $ZENHOME/perf/Devices/devicename/ directory, and are named collector-config.pickle. These pickle files are only read during startup and are periodically recreated, so it is safe to delete them, and it is not necessary to back them up.