Setting refresh rate and discovery cycle

To monitor an application, the PATROL Agent must first discover the application and learn its current status. Discovery takes time and consumes system resources. To lessen the affect of discovery on system performance during discovery, the agent takes a snapshot of the system's process table and stores it in an internal memory structure referred to as the process cache.

When the agent runs a discovery script for an application, the script reads the information from the process cache. Because the cache is in memory, the process takes less time and uses less resources than querying the system. The cache is periodically updated at a user-defined interval. This update is referred to as the refresh. The first time an application discovery script runs after the process cache has been refreshed is called process cache update.